June 10, 2007

By Harry T. Cook
Be careful what you pick up to read for diversion because it may take you down a difficult road to an unpleasant place. That was my experience with The March by E.L. Doctorow, the peerless American writer of historical fiction. I bought the book when it came out but could not fit it in as discretionary reading among the stack of material pertinent to my ongoing research. Then some airport/airplane time begged to be taken up with something other than the contents of the please-buy-me catalogs stuffed into the seat-back pockets of every commercial aircraft in America.

I had packed The March in my carry-on and expected to be as enchanted with its prose as I was with that of several of Doctorow’s other books stretching back to the 1960s, e.g., The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, Loon Lake, World’s Fair, Billy Bathgate, The Water Works and City of God.

This time, though, Doctorow touched an exposed nerve. As you may know, The March is his highly imaginative and yet dead-on reprise of William Tecumseh Sherman’s personally directed Götterdämmerung that consumed the Confederate states of Georgia and the Carolinas in 1864 and 1865.

Talk about shock and awe. Talk about humiliation by terror. That was Sherman’s grand strategy played out in tactics of arson, pillage, beating and rape to ensure that the South would never rise again.

As Doctorow takes the reader deep into wartime Dixie in the company of Sherman’s cavalry and infantry, he spares no detail of casualty, dismemberment, amputation and surgery without anesthesia. One by one, the manses of plantations are looted then burned, their barns and larders emptied of stores and their inhabitants variously abused, sometimes slain or merely left to fend for themselves among the leavings.

If one accepts the principle of preserving the Union by ending slavery as an acceptable casus belli, and if the end justifies the means, then what Doctorow accounts for so vividly in The March rises in all its gore to perverse nobility. If the South would never have given in, would inevitably have fought to the last man, then what can only be termed Sherman’s scorched-earth policy makes him a hero.

I should not have read The March at the same time that I was contemplating America’s war against Iraq. Yes, I said “against” Iraq because what we are doing there is certainly not “for” Iraq but “for” whatever it is a tragically ignorant and confused George W. Bush has in mind in sending U.S. troops into the insurgents’ meat-grinder.

One of Doctorow’s characters is made to scoff at the notion that an army at war is a reasonable thing. Doctorow’s Sherman is made to ponder the idea that the death of the enemy in war is nothing other than a profound humiliation. And the individual soldier himself? Sherman says he thinks of him as a weapon, and one less weapon is a profound loss to the general in his prosecution of the war. As of June 8, the United States had 3,487 fewer “weapons” than in March 2003.

Toward the end of The March a character named Pryce, whom Doctorow depicts as a British journalist, comes to the conclusion that “this war was not an adventure, nor war for a solemn cause; it was war at its purest, a mindless mass rage severed from any cause, ideal or moral principle.” Pryce had seen it all, and he had seen enough – though not soon enough to escape his death in the next sentence as a tree decapitated by a cannonball fell upon him.

That war, as we well know without further instruction from Doctorow, soon ended with the surrender at Appomattox . . . and Lincoln’s assassination. It took less than a decade before the tender mercies of Reconstruction bore down upon the ravaged South and what was left of its misplaced dignity. And then, of course, Reconstruction turned into a racist nightmare for former slaves, many of whom came to think they might be better off as wards back on the plantation.

The fond and abstract hope of bringing forth (again) on this continent a new nation evaporated as the Confederate States of America clandestinely regrouped under such regencies as the Ku Klux Klan, and as the New South of far-Right politics and fundamentalist religion was transformed into an American Shia.

Sherman’s march with its incendiary cruelty was to have made all that impossible. What it did was to make it not only possible but inevitable. And that is exactly what Bush’s war in Iraq will have wrought.

Neither Allah nor Yahweh, as it turns out, is all that akbar.
© Copyright 2007, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.

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