War and Remembrance
A powerful retelling of the Battle of Franklin, one of the Civil War's bloodiest days.
THE JUDAS FIELD
A Novel of the Civil War
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By Howard Bahr
Henry Holt. 292 pp. $25
"It is well that war is so terrible -- we should grow too fond of it." -- Robert E. Lee, 1863
"Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees." -- Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, 1863
Located somewhere between these quotes, Lee's at the battle of Fredericksburg and Jackson's last words after being (accidentally) shot by his own men at Chancellorsville, lies a fundamental truth about warfare. The experience that men go through in battle becomes a state almost impossible to describe, an otherworldly, near out-of-body experience. It's this strange and primal condition that leads veterans of all combats to remain largely silent about their experiences, even with other veterans. They may speak of the where, the when, occasionally the why, but almost never of what occurred. Tim O'Brien, in his excellent short story collection The Things They Carried (1990), comes close to revealing the nature of such memories, which tend to be fragmentary, contradictory and distorted, leaving the warrior unsure of what happened after the event and even of how he acted and reacted during battle.
In the late hours of daylight on Nov. 30, 1864, the Federal Army led by Brig. Gen. Jacob Cox met the Confederate Army of Tennessee commanded by Lt. Gen. John Hood around the small town of Franklin, Tenn. Each army consisted of slightly more than 20,000 infantry and 5,000 cavalry, but if these numbers suggest an even match they're an inaccurate indicator of the conditions. The federal army arrived early in the day and had time to dig fortifications and determine the field of battle. The rebels arrived late in the afternoon, after days of hard marching, and almost immediately went into battle -- ill-fed and ill-clothed, fighting in battalion lines spread across wide fields, face-on into the setting sun.
The Battle of Franklin has been called the Gettysburg of the West. It began around 4 in the afternoon and ended by 9 that evening, with the final hours fought in darkness. While artillery and cavalry played important roles, the battle consisted mostly of immense bodies of infantry in pitched, hand-to-hand combat. At the end of the day, over 2,300 Union and 2,600 Confederate troops had died. Large portions of the field were several feet deep with the bodies of the dead and dying. The Army of the Tennessee was effectively destroyed.
Howard Bahr's The Judas Field recreates this seminal moment in American history with prose that is vivid, unflinching and often incantatory. The book's pace and detail are wrenching, and it is starkly devoid of romanticism. Within the battlefield scenes, Bahr's accomplishment is magnificent: a fully realized depiction of controlled mass butchery on a field of blood, body parts and utterly obliterated human beings. The reader puts down the book with a sense of shock to find he is not actually inside a level of hell.
The novel swings back and forth between the battle itself and three survivors 20 years later, on a pilgrimage from Mississippi back to Franklin, accompanying the daughter of their company commander, to see the ground on which her father and brother died. All four travelers have distinct and compelling needs that drive the journey. All four seek redemption of some sort, but redemption in The Judas Field is in scant supply.
The stories of ordinary men make for the novel's most provocative and deeply true sections. Even after the war is over and its politics, ideologies and the malignant tumor of human bondage are no longer live issues, the soldiers who survive the war are never done with it. This condition is not presented as the romantic clinging to a lost cause that has impeded honest assessment of those Americans who fought and lost a war, but as a complex meditation on existence. Bahr writes, "The war did this too: it put those who suffered by it all together in a glass jar like so many strange, dangerous insects, and they could crawl up and down the glass all they wanted, but they could never reach the other side. By the same token, no one else could enter, so inside the jar they created their own world out of memory and grief."
Not far from where I live is a small house shared by three veterans of Vietnam. They live quietly, as far as I can tell. ·
Jeffrey Lent is the author of "In the Fall" and "Lost Nation."