The March

You can go months without hearing about many American wars and even when you do hear about them it's usually only as history. America's Civil War, however, is one that still defines America. As I write this, on Memorial Day of 2017, I can look at a newspaper within the past week that shows some people protesting as most others applaud the removal of statues of Confederate war figures in the South.
 It's good to know something about this war, and Doctorow's 2005 The March is a good way to learn about the tail end of it and its many issues. It depicts Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's campaign through the Confederate south, and gives a balanced view of both sides. Let's just say the Union Army was not made up of fair-minded heroes and southerners were not two-dimensional villains.
 They say history is written by the victors and that's true. For that reason, Doctorow's fictionalized account should be on the reading list of anyone interested in America's Civil War.
 An odd thing about the edition I read, by the way, is that it opens with a full five pages of excerpts from favorable reviews. Maybe the publishers thought it needed to psyche up readers to stick with it, but I don't think it was needed for a novel that had been a New York Times best seller.

1) ''They are coming, Mattie, they are marching. It is an army of wild dogs led by this apostate, this hideous wretch, this devil who will drink your tea and bow before he takes everything from you.''

2) ''Yes, we are wet and cold and hungry on this dark November night, but alive, which is a sight better than the dead faling to the ground every minute in every state of the Confederacy. And that we are alive by shifting our way about from one side t'other as the situation demands shows we already have something gifted about us. I feel the intention, all right, and I am sorry you don't. And I will pray He don't task you for being ungrateful. Or take it out on me.''

3) ''Though he looked forward to the next chance to cable his accounts, he was thinking more of the book he would write when he returned home. The fact was that he loved this war in America. These provincials excited him, the sixty thousand of them swinging a thirty-mile-wide scythe of destruction across a once bountiful land. Most of the men he spoke with, even junior officers, were not terribly articulate: the South had to be punished, the niggers had to be freed was the usual level of discourse. And he found them childish in their adoration of their ''Uncle Billy.'' (God help the poor sod of a yeoman who addressed Cromwell as Uncle Ollie.) But they were intrepid. He had seen them build bridges, dismantle railroad lines, overrun entrenchments, and maintain a pace of ten to fifteen miles a day regardless of the terrain or the weather. As men they were woefully unschooled, but as a military force they transcended their class.''

4) ''Though this march is done, and well accomplished, I think of it now, God help me, with longing---not for its blood and death but for the bestowal of meaning to the very ground trod upon, how it made every field and swamp and river and road into something of moral consequence, whereas now, as the march dissolves so does the meaning, the army strewing itself into the isolated intentions of diffuse private life, and the terrain thereby left blank and also diffuse, and ineffable, a thing once again, and victoriously, without reason, and, whether diurnally lit and darkened, or sere or fruitful, or raging or calm, completely insensible and without any purpose of its own.
And why is Grant so solemn today upon our great achievement, except he knows this unmeaning inhuman planet will need our warring imprint to give it value, and that our civil war, the devastating manufacture of the bones of our sons, is but a war after a war, a war before a war.''