No war conjures up such deep-rooted, overwhelming sadness in Americans as our own Civil War. The open wounds may have healed over the past 140 years or so, but the scars are vivid. Sure, there has been plenty of grief associated with the conflicts of the past 100 years, but there is something about the Civil War that taps into the national psyche like no other.
With “The Black Flower” and “The Year of Jubilo,” Howard Bahr has established a reputation for re-creating the angst of the generation that fought and suffered on the homefront through the battles and the reconstruction of that national tragedy. He has done so with an impact that comes from only the most talented writers, those with the capacity to put to paper the most eloquent thoughts and feelings and senses of time and place that the language can provide.
He has done it again with “The Judas Field,” another intimate story of the Civil War and the toll it took on the people who lived through it.
Like Robert Hicks’ moving novel, “The Widow of the South,” “The Judas Field” centers on the bloody and ferocious battle that took place just outside Franklin, Tenn. Set 20 years after that battle, which essentially doomed the South and saved the Union, “The Judas Field” centers on Cass Wakefield, a Southern soldier who has not been able to leave it all behind.
Soldier now a widower
Cass lives in the same house that he and his young bride set up before he went away to fight. She died while he was gone, and Cass has not touched the house that has slowly faded into decrepitude. He drinks a lot and remembers battles and those who fell in them. He’s not a happy man.
The ghosts of his past come to the forefront when a friend, Alison Sansing, asks him to help her bring the remains of her father and brother who died at the Battle of Franklin back to their home in Mississippi.
On the way back to Tennessee, all the memories come flooding back to Cass as the narrative moves back and forth from the present to the battle and back again.
We learn how Cass and his friend Roger Lewellyn go from battle to battle dealing with their fear and falling further and further into a desperate depression. We learn how they befriend a young boy named
Lucien who shows up one day out of the blue and attaches himself to the soldiers.
As the story progresses, Cass and Alison, accompanied by Lucien and Roger, make their way to Franklin. They are tossed about by their memories and the emotions those memories bring to the surface. It is not a happy trip.
This is not an easy novel to read. It is unrelentingly somber. The Southern army is not a group of hale fellows well met. They are miserable and scared. Like all combatants, they think longingly of home and sweethearts. They become inured to death and unimaginable injuries. Most of all, they come to care about each other.
That said, “The Judas Field” also contains some mighty fine writing. Bahr knows how to turn a phrase and tug on the emotions, visceral feelings that we try to keep buried. His descriptions of the carnage of battlefields, of what bullets and bayonets can do to human flesh, will chill you to the bone.
But Bahr doesn’t write to shock the reader, but to inform you, to show you that war truly is hell and that no one who goes through it comes out the other side anywhere near the same as when they entered it. It’s a valuable lesson even today.
He also has the eyes and ears of an artist, describing a bucolic scene of a mist-shrouded farmhouse at dawn or the trill of cicadas as the sun goes down on a sultry summer day with the same clear-eyed acumen that he brings to his descriptions of men tearing each other apart in the heat of battle. His is a rare talent.
Books editor Tom Walker can be reached at 303-820-1624 or twalker@denverpost.com.
The Judas Field
By Howard Bahr
Henry Holt, 292 pages, $25
