Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #863125 in Books
• Published on: 2006-07-25
• Released on: 2006-07-25
• Format: Bargain Price
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 304 pages

From Publishers Weekly
A middle-aged salesman in 1885 Mississippi, Cass Wakefield is a Civil War veteran of the Army of Tennessee, which saw action far from the leadership of Robert E. Lee, and ended, badly, at the battle of Franklin in 1864. Cass agrees to accompany a neighbor, 54-year-old terminally ill widow Alison Sansing, to Tennessee to recover the bodies of her father and brother, killed at Franklin. As they travel north, Cass's memories return with painful vividness, culminating as he walks over the scene of his army's disastrous defeat. Bahr (The Black Flower) moves back and forth between the tattered post-Reconstruction South and the war. He describes the effect of weapons on flesh in gruesome detail and brings to life a long-gone era with its strange smells, foods, fashions and principles. Though his uneducated characters often seem a little too articulate, their insights are excellent. Author of other well-regarded novels on the same period, Bahr treats the war as a natural disaster not unlike a hurricane. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
"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.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Lent
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
In his third Civil War novel (after the highly praised The Black Flower, 1997, and Year of Jubilo, 2000), Bahr focuses not only on the carnage of battle but its horrible aftermath. Twenty years after the Battle of Franklin, Tennessee, in which more than 70 percent of the estimated 8,500-plus casualties were Confederate, Alison Sansing of Cumberland, Mississippi, who's dying of cancer, asks her friend Cass Wakefield, a survivor of the conflict, to help her bring home the remains of her father and brother, who died there. Although reluctant to return to Franklin, Cass refuses the help of fellow veterans--Roger Lewellyn, his "pard," and Lucian Wakefield, a 13-year-old orphan conscript--but both show up at the battlefield, where an encounter with a crazed old man leads to tragedy. Bahr masterfully portrays ordinary men called to war whose belief in courage, honor, pride, and comrades sustains them but leaves them empty but for their terrible memories and grief. A beautifully written portrayal of the price that war exacts. Michele Leber
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

The Written War
Daniel Aaron, in The Unwritten War, lamented that the Civil War never produced a great work of fiction until, possibly, William Faulkner's works. If anyone ever updates that book, the author may come to a happier conclusion with the works of Howard Bahr. Lost in the clamor over Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain, Bahr's novel of the Battle of Franklin, The Black Flower--published the same year as Frazier's fine book--was a taut, beautiful tale that I have recommended to readers for years as the best Civil War novel I know. The excellent follow-up book, The Year of Jubilo, carried the story of Yalobusha County's Confederate sons forward to Reconstruction. Now comes The Judas Field, proving that Bahr is not just our greatest Civil War novelist, but one of our greatest modern novelists, period. Others describe the particulars of the story below, so there is no need for me to do that here. Suffice it to say that with this book, Bahr's fictional world, stretching from Mississippi to the cotton gin at Franklin, is beginning to resemble Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha. This body of work deserves ten stars.

The Civil War was more than just battles.
Magnificent! Mr. Bahr has written a wonderful, poignant, personal view of how the brutality of the Civil War affected those that lived it. War is the ultimate of human endeavors; those who have been embraced by it are changed forever. Brutality on a grand scale that brings into question the essence of the human condition. Mr. Bahr reaches into the very soul of those who have witnessed the carnage and examines how their lives are changed forever. His character development was superb. His use of the pervasive darkness of that era was stunning in its portrayal. Men fought and died not for their nation but for their beliefs in their fellow comrades. Mr. Bahr is a genius at putting into words the timeless love of men and women who lived those desperate hours. War is terrible but man's belief in himself and those who he fights beside transcends the violence of the battlefield.
I highly recommend this classic novel for anyone who wants to briefly glimpse what it is like to taste, hear, smell, and feel the horrors of the battlefield. No gratuitous violence, although the graphic nature of battle is portrayed in all its ugliness. Mr. Bahr's trilogy of the civil war is the best I have ever read on how those that lived it, dealt with its horrors. He is a master at showing how the glories of the battlefield scared an entire generation for years after the guns went silent. A must read.

Superb
I have been a Howard Bahr fan since THE BLACK FLOWER, and now he has in this third novel written a fine portrayal of the burden of the Civil War on those who fought it and the ones who waited. Bahr is a master of description and his prose is poetic in its imagery. Anyone who thinks that war is noble must read Cass Wakefield's ever-present memories of the Battle of Franklin--his comrades who were blown to bits, the bloody ground, the maimed corpses, the futile stand by an army ill-equipped, starving, and threadbare. It was Franklin, Tennessee, but it could be Iraq. The reader should make a trip to the site of the battle and walk among the headstones in the little cemetery. There are ghosts there.