Wrenching memories of the Civil War

ON the battlefield of our national memory, the Civil War remains bitterly contested ground.

One of the many admirable things about Howard Bahr’s absorbing new novel, “The Judas Field,” is the absence of the wearyingly familiar quarrels that seem to afflict any discussion of that terrible and enduring conflict. This is a mature work of fiction by a gifted writer -- affectingly eloquent and fearless of complexity and ambiguity.

This is the author’s third Civil War novel. His first, the impressive “Black Flower,” had the misfortune to come out the same month as Charles Frazier’s blockbuster “Cold Mountain” and sold just 12,000 copies, though both men were nominated for the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction. In Bahr’s case, it was an altogether apt nomination: His convincing evocation of the private soldiers’ harrowing lot puts his work squarely -- and not undeservedly -- in Crane’s tradition. As he told one interviewer, “I have little interest in the problems of generals.”

Bahr is a Southerner, born in Mississippi and educated -- following a stint as a railway worker -- at Ole Miss. For seven years he served as a curator at Rowan Oak, William Faulkner’s storied home, and these days Bahr teaches English at Motlow State Community College in Tullahoma, Tenn. The geography is crucial, since Bahr is preoccupied with the experience of the Mississippi regiments in the Confederate Army of Tennessee. The dramatic fulcrum of both “Black Flower” and “The Judas Field” is that army’s pointless -- almost suicidal -- destruction at the Battle of Franklin in Tennessee, following the fall of Atlanta. (In fact, Bushrod Carter, the first novel’s protagonist, makes a number of appearances in this new book.)

Bahr is a writer with a fluent lyric facility, subtly ensuring that the brutality of his narrative events never becomes numbing. The first two paragraphs of “The Judas Field,” for example, introduce the book’s central protagonist thus:

“Cass Wakefield was born in a double-pen log cabin just at break of day, and before he was twenty minutes old, he was almost thrown out with the bedclothes. The midwife, Queenolia Divine, heard him squalling, however, and so it was that Cass, blue-faced and complaining, was untangled from the wad of bloody sheets and saved for further adventures.

“The first light he saw fell on the northeast corner of Yalobusha County, Mississippi, in a cleared place among ancient oaks and hickories and sweetgums called Lost Camp.... “

The story picks up in 1885, 20 years after Lee surrendered at Appomattox. Cass, a veteran of the 21st Mississippi Infantry, remains literally haunted by memories of the war. He sees the ghosts of the fallen. Cass has made a modest sort of success as a traveling salesman of Colt handguns but now lives a desultory, mostly drunken life in his hometown with his informally adopted “son,” Lucian, an orphan conscripted into the Confederate army at 14. He too is beset by wrenching memory, which he dulls with laudanum. Their old comrade, the pianist Roger Lewellyn, also survived the war and, married to Cass’ cousin, remains a close companion.

The centrality of memory and the way in which it both connects and deforms the memoirist is Bahr’s real theme. One of the characters muses that hell probably is a place of utter forgetfulness, yet all seem condemned to their recollections.

When the boy soldier Lucian asks the older men how he ever will be able to describe his first battle, Roger replies: “ ‘If we live a thousand years, we won’t ever find a way to tell it.’ He coughed, and turned his head to spit. ‘In a battle, everything is wrong, nothing you ever learned is true anymore. And when you come out -- if you do -- you can’t remember. You have to put it back together by the rules you know, and you end up with a lie. That’s the best you can do, and when you tell it, it’ll still be a lie.’

“Cass said to the boy, ‘You were in that fight the other day -- what do you remember of it?’

“Lucian thought a moment. ‘Legs, mostly,’ he said. ‘Smoke, fire, noise. Sometimes I think like it lasted twenty seconds, other times a month or so. All I really remember is you dragging me acrost that cotton field. I don’t even know who beat.’

“ ‘That’s good,’ said Cass. ‘Put that in your memoirs, and you will be telling the truth.’ ”

All this is brought once again to the fore when Cass’ childhood friend, Alison Sansing, prevails on him to return to Franklin to help her recover the bodies of her father and brother -- the regiment’s colonel and adjutant -- who were killed there and buried on the battlefield. Though she initially conceals it from Cass, Alison is dying of cancer and wants to see her relatives interred in the family plot before she is.

Their journey, which Lucian and Roger join, forces Cass to confront his wartime traumas. The most painful of them is the battle at Franklin, which he vainly tries to describe to Alison, concluding: “That’s why you got to imagine it. That was us, once upon a time, death walking down to death -- Jesus -- “

The return to Franklin unintentionally provokes a violent confrontation that recapitulates a wartime atrocity in which the three comrades participated and which Cass bitterly regrets. It seems, at first, a discordantly melodramatic note but is redeemed by Roger’s subsequent reflection: “That’s the trouble. It was all too easy. That seems a thing one ought to forget how to do, or even want to do.”

One interesting subtext is the 19th century characters’ unsentimental reconciliation of their faith in God with the horrific events through which they live. When Cass returns from the war to find his much-loved wife dead, he carries a handful of earth into the church and casually uses it to extinguish the sanctuary lamp, which burns to signify the divine presence. When the local priest, a Union veteran who lost a leg at Gettysburg, comes to visit some time after that event, this testy exchange ensues:

“Cass put his hands together. He said, ‘Mister Brennan, I have not lost my faith, and I do not presume to fault the Almighty for His apparent indifference. It is only that I am tired of making excuses for Him. I am tired of hearing about His design this and His design that; if He has one at all, ‘tis a sorry one indeed and of no use to anybody. The facts bear it out, as you ought to know yourself.’

“The priest nodded. He sipped his coffee and this time placed the cup carefully back in its saucer. ‘Well then,’ he said, ‘I see your God is a personal one. Perhaps you’d be more comfortable with a vague abstraction....’ ”

Bahr’s title and his epigraph allude to the ancient tradition that, after Judas hanged himself, the 40 pieces of silver he received for his betrayal were used to purchase the “potter’s field” as a paupers’ cemetery and that it became known as “aceldama” or “the field of blood.”

But who was the betrayer at Franklin? Was it the commanding general, the Texan John Bell Hood, who some historians speculate ordered a suicidal charge on the Union fortifications to punish his troops for their defeat at Atlanta? As a Confederate disaster, the attack ranked with Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg. Six generals died on the Franklin field; there were 6,252 Southern casualties, including 1,750 killed in action.

Was the betrayer, in fact, the cause in which Cass and his comrades preserved so valiantly? It was, after all, as U.S. Grant described it, “the worse cause to which any man ever gave himself.”

Or, are there circumstances in which perseverance -- however selfless -- is a kind of betrayal?

It is one of the provocative questions asked by “The Judas Field,” a beautifully wrought novel that deserves a wide audience.