Love and War

grasped his index finger. He drew it into his mouth and gnawed vigorously.

Duncan had already lectured Charles about the need for cleanliness. So far today, he had scrubbed his hands three times — something of a record in his adult life. He wiggled his finger. Charles Augustus gurgled. Charles smiled. With all of his attention on his son, he didn't see the rail fence that suddenly appeared beside the track or the feasting buzzards disturbed by the train and swirling upward, away from the rotting remains of a black horse.

The war has left a great gulf between what happened before it in our century and what has happened since. … It does not seem to me as if I am living in the country in which I was born.

George Ticknor of Harvard, 1869

AFTERWORD

All changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

So wrote Yeats in 'Easter 1916.' His nine words are the under­pinning of this novel.

Love and War was not written to demonstrate, again, that war is hell, though it is; or to show slavery, again, as our most heinous national crime, though arguably it is. Both ideas figure in the story, and not in a small way. But this is meant to be a tale about change as a universal force and constant, told in terms of a group of characters living through the greatest redefinition of America, in the shortest time, that we have ever experienced: the Civil War.

In his book Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction, Professor James McPherson of Princeton splendidly characterizes the war as 'the central event in the American historical consciousness. ... [It] preserved this nation from destruction and determined, in large measure, what sort of nation it would be. The war settled two fundamental issues ... whether [the United States] was to be a nation with a sovereign national government, or a dissoluble confederation of sovereign states; and whether this nation, born of a declaration that all men are created with an equal right to liberty, was to continue to exist as the largest slave- holding country in the world.'

Beyond the essential element of a strong narrative, I felt the book needed three things if it were to do its job.

First, it needed detail. And not the detail of the more familiar events, either. As the book developed from a first draft on my typewriter through the final draft on my IBM PC, a new mental signboard was hung where I couldn't miss it. (The permanent signboard, very old now, reads: Storytelling first.) The new one said: Not Gettysburg again.

The details I wanted were many from what I call the byways: the fascinating places novels about the Civil War seldom go. To the bottom of Charleston harbor, for instance, where the astonishing and astonishingly small, submersible Hunley forecast a dramatic change in naval warfare. Into the bureaucracy and the cavalry camps. To the work sites of an engineer battalion and a military railroad track crew. Inside Libby Prison, over to Liverpool, and back to the Ordnance Department in Washington, with its permanent parade of inventors, some sane, many mad. I even wanted to go onto a camp stage to show a bit of the Civil War equivalent of a USO show; the skit that Charles and Ab watch is authentic.

Hoping that what interests me would interest readers, I chose a number of these lesser-known byways and began the search, which took a year. There is certainly no shortage of material. Quoting McPherson again, 'Perhaps it is simply because the conflict was so astonishingly, rich and varied that it is inexhaustible.' Historian Burke Davis observed that 'more than 100,000 volumes of [Civil War literature] have failed to tell the tale to the satisfaction of ... readers.' Or of writers, for that matter. I could see no way to include a relatively recent, fascinating finding that in England, in the desperate late hours of the Confederacy, operatives may have developed a primitive two-stage guided missile. The device was allegedly shipped to a site in Virginia, then tested and fired at Washington. The burning of records in Richmond consumed whatever report may have been made of the missile's performance, and we have no evidence that it struck or even came close to its target or, indeed, any evidence that it existed at all. No room for that story. And many more.

But I hope there are enough specifics, for only by means of them is it possible to take a stab at suggesting what it was like to serve in, and live through, the struggle.

Librarian-scholar Richard H. Shryock aptly stated the case for detail fifty years ago: 'Political and military traditions, plus the apparent necessity for abstraction, rob historical writings of that realism which alone can convey a sense of the suffering involved in a great war. An historian's description of the battle of Gettysburg is likely to tell of what occurred to Lee's right wing, or to Longstreet's corps, but rarely of what happened to [the bodies of] plain John Jones and the thousands like him. ... The historians might, however, picture reality and convey a sense of the costs involved if, in describing campaigns, they gave less space to tactics in the field and more to ... the camps and hospitals.'

Amen. That is the reason Charles encounters the first land mines on the peninsula, and Cooper experiments with 'torpedoes' (confusingly, that term at the time meant naval mines). That is one reason Cooper descends in Hunley, whose full-size replica stands outside the entrance of the Museum of the City of Charleston today. That is why there is less here about generals than about soldiers of lower rank tending their horses, losing company elections, getting ill, feeling homesick, reading tracts and pornography, scrounging food, sewing clothes, scratching lice.

One problem with some of the details of the war is their tendency to strain credulity because we gaze at them through a modern lens flawed by the circumstances and skepticism of our own time. Thus it may be hard to accept the virtual absence of presidential security even in the Executive Mansion, or the fact that Lincoln got his first solid news of the Fredericksburg defeat from an angry field correspondent frustrated by military censors, or that the unsteady General Burnside, in connection with the same engagement, consulted his personal chef for strategic advice. The reader must take particulars like these on faith; they are not invented, no matter how odd they may seem.

Some of the details that are fictional have a sound and reasoned base in possibility. Powell's scheme, for one — no more unlikely than the real plan to establish a 'third nation' by joining the Upper South — the so-called border states — with the Middle West. This idea was afloat in Richmond during the winter of '62-'63. A Pacific Confederacy, also mentioned in the novel, was widely rumored early in the war.

The assassination plot against Davis is an invention, but it, too, seems logical in view of two givens. One, if Lincoln was constantly considered an assassin's target, why not his Confederate counterpart? Especially since — two — Davis was just as passionately hated, most notably by some from his own cotton South. I sometimes wonder if the few present-day Southerners who ride around in pickups adorned with crass license plates declaring Hell no I ain't fergittin'! have ever heard of Messrs. Brown and Vance — the war governors of Georgia and North Carolina respectively — surely two of the most venomous enemies a Chief Executive ever had. Furiously waving the banner of states' rights, they damned and defied the central government, withheld men, uniforms, and shoes the army desperately needed, and generally did as much, or more, damage as many a Union field commander.

Neither governor is here accused of sinister plotting. But a man such as Powell, whose remedy for grievance is bullets, is not that far removed from those like Brown and Vance who continually screamed 'dictator' and 'despot' at Jefferson Davis.

The second ingredient I needed, also mentioned in the Afterword of North and South, was accuracy.

I don't mean infallibility. In a novel this long and complex, it's impossible to be perfect. But it's absolutely