Doctorow's War

...We will replace lost blood...

...And immediate chagrin over my own smugness was quickly salved by the absorbing pleasure of reading this complex, splendid story...

...Wrede" is an old Dutch or Low German word that means "fierce" or "cruel," and "Sarto-rius" is a Latinized way of being called "Tailor"—as he is in his skillful and impersonal cutting and sewing...

...At first, she sees Sartorius as "transcendent . . . like some god trying to staunch the flow of human disaster...

...In particular, images of rivers, swamps, and fog, literally accurate, stand in as well as metaphor for the uncertainty of battle...

...Marcus Aurelius Thompson and his slave Sophie on the train to a siding in nowhere: "Am I the Pharaoh...

...battles and skirmishes...

...It's not something in itself...

...Perhaps Doc-torow would profit by rereading his own book...

...A poetic fancy, it has no basis in fact," he said, as if he shouldn't have to tell her...

...And humming "The Ride of the Valkyries," he is brought low by what he calls God's envy, when he reads in a newspaper of the death of another son...

...The mind is the work of the brain...

...none of the characters is dispensable...

...Well, it ain't exactly that new...

...Albion Simms would deteriorate under study...

...Then an affliction of her soul, perhaps...

...For the thoughtful reader, especially if he's concerned with the perilous state of mind that encourages roiling emotion to color policy preference, The March lays out profound, true pictures of genuine complexity...

...In a vituperative opinion piece on "The Unfeeling President," published in 2004, he scorns George W Bush up one side and down the other: "The president does not know what death is...

...A fleeing matron appears at a relative's home "standing up in the equipage like some hag of doom," an erinye...

...It is, indeed, also the case that they are bound in morality and justice, in their prayers and in their counsel, to consider the individual human casualties of the wars they prosecute...

...He even diagnoses Lincoln's Marfans syndrome, though not in so many words, when he encounters the president much later...

...As he has done elsewhere (Ragtime, for example), Doc-torow introduces to one another people who would otherwise be unlikely to meet, and here places them in the context of historical events that could hardly be surpassed as dramatic narrative...

...The observant Colonel Morrison believes Sherman is proud and cynical, concealing a feeling of "superiority to all," and careless of the deaths of his troops...

...Arly is philosophical...

...So he has a cage built to transport the unfortunate man in order to test his idea that the brain will "recede like an outgoing tide...

...It has to be in the nature of war that generals consider armies as men en masse...

...She has accurately seen that Wrede is "a magus bent on tampering with the created universe...

...With the fortuitous inheritance of a photographer's wagon, he sets off to find General Sherman himself and to carry out the "mighty purpose" that has been made known to him...

...General Sherman sees a skirmish as if "the smoke were the diaphanous dance veil of the war goddess...

...Will and Arly meet when they're both under sentence of death, thrown into the Confederate hoosegow in Milledgeville for desertion and sleeping on guard duty...

...There are four dead Willies mourned in The March: Sherman's son, Hardee's, and Lincoln's, and the Kirkland's boy from North Carolina, and we're intended to notice them all...

...Meanwhile...

...He is splendidly disdainful of the southerners who have brought war upon themselves, and yet think that its consequences might be controlled...

...Wrede is fascinated by the scientific phenomenon at first— the loss of memory but the sound reflexes and ability to see and hear...

...Perhaps it's the case that the irony of this, unrecognized, feeds the violence of Doctorow's anger with George Bush...

...Doctorow calls also upon the ancient and persuasive trope of sympathetic nature to paint a world at war...

...Because if I'm the Pharaoh I'm convinced...

...We will photograph through the body to the bones...

...And this has a curious result...

...It is a very fine, even a great, novel about the nature of important things—war, human nature, freedom, imagination—and a riveting story as well...

...Doctorow allows Sherman to contemplate the general's paradoxical situation: "[P]erhaps we call a private a private, for whatever he is to himself it is private to him and of no use to the General...

...Yet this appallingly mechanistic point of view (though he never abandons it) is tempered by occasional awareness...

...We may have dominion over them, but it don't hurt to pick up a pointer or two...

...Arly contemplates their partnership...

...It would be hard to beat, and I rolled up my sleeves to be reminded about What is Wrong with Something, probably America...

...The March is an interestingly literate novel...

...It's not at all problematic in the novel, but it casts a curious light on those outside jeremiads...

...The soul...

...But the officers on his staff have seen him in despair after the death of his son Will, and various strategic reverses...

...The threads of the story are inextricably intertwined...

...It's marvelously evocative and a sobering reminder that cliché ("the fog of war") may well have its origin in the literal...

...You take what you need from where you happen to be, like a lion on the plains, like a hawk in the mountains, who are also creatures of God's making, you do remember...

...He charges Bush with feeling nothing, regretting nothing, mourning nothing, when he sends young soldiers off to war...

...In a series of parallel narratives, Doctorow follows the experiences of a wide cast of characters—dispossessed planters, newly freed slaves, a number of officers on Sherman's staff, the general himself—caught up in the march and its periphery...

...But the tale of Will Kirkland and Arly Wilcox, two very young Confederate privates tossed about in the chaos, weaves the strands into a whole...

...But when she talks with him about what's happened to a woman demented by the war, she sees further into him: Emily said, "Then it's not the brain but her mind that's afflicted...

...Sherman wrestles with these contradictions himself, fearing death mostly as "a profound humiliation...

...Doctorow's Sherman rings true, drawing on the great fund of what we do know about him to explore his paradoxical character...

...He's another sort of philosopher entirely...

...Doctorow, no slouch in the jeremiad department, had chosen as the setting for his new novel the earth-scorching trajectory of William Tecumseh Sherman's famous march from Atlanta to the sea...

...Yet he contemplates, at times, the deaths of individual soldiers, and writes a moving letter to the Confederate General Hardee when his son, another Will, is killed in an engagement with Sherman's troops...

...She is fascinated and seduced by him, figuratively and literally, as he explains the nature of the march...

...I don't need no frogs, nor no locusts, I'm letting you go...

...BY PRISCILLA M. JENSEN Though popular interest in the Civil War has gone through periodic surges and declines since about autumn 1865, the most recent vogue for reexamination, analysis, and romance has been going pretty strong since at least the late 1980s...

...There is active allusion and reference...

...The March is not a pamphlet, or a treatise, or even a war novel...

...One needn't exaggerate its long-term importance to recognize that many people seem to be experiencing an unprecedented degree of overlap between their personal feelings and their political beliefs, and to see that the metaphor of the house divided might strike a resounding chord right about now...

...But when Emily hears the demented woman play Chopin, she asks, "'What is this I hear if not a soul given as music?' And immediately she ran off to gather her belongings...

...He's a brilliant surgeon who gets away with his disregard of army hierarchy by his effectiveness...

...And there is, but it is a mighty burden, revealed to Arly by his companion's death...

...The suspense, and the suspension of daily life, as southerners, black and white, wait for the Federal army to arrive...

...the "foraging" and burning...

...disagreements over the Iraq war have sustained a maelstrom of emotion...

...Sherman affected the sloppy uniform, and shared the hardships, of the enlisted man...

...This is the sort of story that invites one to recommence with "meanwhile...

...He hasn't the mind for it...

...There is a mighty purpose that we are meant to fulfill...

...a prophetic diagnostician who assures his companion Emily Thompson that someday "we will have found botanical molds to reverse infection...

...The echo of Faulkner appears to be accidental, though Carlyle would bear some looking into...

...Sartorius, for whom science is all, still is haunted by a sense of tragedy...

...both in style and substance, Doctorow locates it firmly in the Western tradition...

...The March as metaphor, even as allegory...

...The commander in chief is a general as well...

...Wrede had looked at her, regretting her remark...

...He is unable to reck his own rede...

...And Arly echoes the psalms and the atavistic image of journey when he tries to encourage Will at one point: On the march is the new way to live...

...And so on...

...Sherman is mightily impatient with governing the towns he captures, or dealing with the freedmen who follow his train and civilian cavillers in Washington...

...The hospital's surgeon, Wrede Sar-torius, is drawn in sharp contrast to the unlettered and hapless boys...

...Tents in an army encampment are like Cadmus' "crop of teeth sprung up from the earth...

...I was inclined to speculate further along these lines when I found that E.L...

...Without exactly making him into a symbol, Doctorow is generous with allusions that indicate Sartorius's nature and disposition...

...Scenes of limbing trees for firewood are juxtaposed with scenes of limbing men...

...With his eagle eye for the main chance, Arly is able to maneuver himself and the bemused Will through a series of protean changes: from Rebs to Yanks and back again a couple of times, till they land on their feet as ambulance attendants with a Federal field hospital...

...Through the past decade or so, experiences from Bill Clinton's, um, dissembling, through the divisive contest over the 2000 election, the shock of 9/11, and deeply felt Priscilla M. Jensen writes from McLean, Virginia...

...Dust rises around an approaching army as "an upward streaming brown cloud . . . as if the world were turned upside down...

...and above all, the momentum of the march itself, form an irresistible movement that sweeps the reader along with the participants...

...This is a vivid scene but regrettably unlikely, since Die Walküre was not performed till 1870...

...Swapping their uniforms with dead Yankee sol-diers'—Will tries to remember "what the word was for the next thing down from a deserter"—they find themselves back in Milledgeville with the occupying forces, caught up in the tide that will toss them between the sides like flotsam...

...Reprieved to rejoin the Confederate defense against the approaching Federals, they join in the fighting around a covered bridge and, in the confusion of battle, slip over to the other side in hopes of escaping the war altogether...

...He considers that, as God has saved them from execution, He must surely have a plan in mind, and Arly is determined to use his own "good sense and artful cunning" to figure it out...

...See Doctorow's The Waterworks for the harrowing finale of Sarto-rius's career as magus...

...When Will is wounded trying to steal a horse, Arly takes him along in an ambulance wagon for verisimilitude...

...The understanding shown in this nuanced portrait, and the completely imagined world realized in The March, disconnect violently from Doctorow's public rhetoric...

...Leaving policy debate essentially aside, he presumes to see into Bush's soul, and neither charity nor, failing it, prudence moves him to consider the possibility that feeling is not always publicly parsed...

...The comprehensive imagination that has allowed him to make a nearly perfect war poem of this novel is not even briefly brought to bear on reality...

...It's through the portrait, at times almost endearing, of Sherman, that one begins to get at what's seriously problematic with Doctorow...

...Any day now, I b'lieve we will hear what God has meant for you and me to do in this sad war and what his reason was . . . [to] set us to traveling with the wrong army...

...Emily, "Judge Thompson's daughter from over at Milledgeville," has joined the march after her home is overrun and her father dies...

...More than once, "Uncle Billy" goes unrecognized in his "old beaten up cap, and a cigar stub in his mouth," and when Columbia is unintentionally burned, he joins the fire brigades himself for a time...

...Wrede Sartorius is not an uncomplicated magus, all the same, as we see in his horrifying and poignant attachment to the wounded Albion Simms, "physically unimpaired but for an iron spike in his skull...

...The poem, the work of making, in its completeness is more reasonable and true than his diatribe on this present war...

...And so a generalship diminishes the imagination of the General...

...But Doctorow doesn't require Sherman to ponder these things in public, or even demand a cri de coeur of the Christ-like Lincoln, who appears near the end of The March...

...Perhaps the continuing vigor of this fad is nourished, in part, by the domestic political atmosphere...

...It is a "nonhuman form of life," he says, a "great segmented body . . . self-healing" that replaces dead "cells" (soldiers) with living ones...

...The plethora of casualties" allow Sartorius to consider the war a "practicum...

...he asks of her...

...Sartorius prides himself on his rejection of the constraints of his German upbringing, and of the "military mind...

...Meanwhile, Will and Arly, finding themselves left behind after a respite in captured Savannah, attempt to rejoin the march...

...He wonders on a rainy morning if there is a similarity between himself and Albion, "as if something had been severed as well in the Sartorian brain that impelled him now to seek knowledge with no regard for the consequences...