The March
E L Doctorow Little, Brown, 384pp, £11.99
ISBN 0316731986
On 8 November 1864, General Wil-liam Tecumseh Sherman issued a special field order to the large Union army he had assembled in recently conquered Atlanta, informing his men that they were about to embark on a campaign that would for ever change the face of warfare. The goal, he claimed, was "to strike a blow at our enemy that will have a material effect in producing what we all so much desire, his complete overthrow". The subsequent "March to the Sea", a 250-mile rampage during which South-ern civilians were targeted with as much ferocity as Confederate troops, led to Sherman's identification as the inventor of the type of total war that would be waged in the following century. When this unprepossessing, emotionally unstable Ohioan claimed that "war is all hell" he knew what he was talking about.
E L Doctorow's vast, incisive and moving new novel takes Sherman's infamous march as its setting, using the same methodology as Ragtime and Billy Bathgate, in which fictional characters seamlessly intermingle with people from real-life history to form a narrative that is both majestically broad and painfully intimate. Appearances by figures such as Ulysses S Grant, the Confederate general Joseph Johnston and even Abraham Lincoln by no means dwarf Doctorow's fictional creations. As in his previous works, iconic figures wind up playing second fiddle to folk who would not merit mention in history books.
Foremost among these unknowns is Colonel Wrede Sartorius, a German-born surgeon who comes as close as anyone in the novel to representing an authorial point of view (Sartorius also figures in Doctorow's novel The Waterworks). A civilised man who exists in a thoroughly uncivilised environment, Sartorius keeps his sanity among the severed limbs and dying screams by maintaining a deeply rational devotion to his craft. "For if not science, then despair," he thinks at one point, a phrase that could serve as his motto. His belief in the supremacy of the intellect is tested not only by the general slaughter around him, but also by his unexpected love for Emily Thompson, the soulful Southern belle who becomes his volunteer nurse after Sherman's troops force her from her home. That they belong to warring factions makes their romance difficult; the difference in their views of human nature dooms it. "I do not reduce life to its sentiments, Dr Sartorius," Emily says after he scorns her belief in the soul. "I enlarge life to its sentiments."
Several other turbulent relationships lie at the heart of the novel, reminding the reader that this is not so much a story about war as it is about civil strife. Wilma Jones and Coalhouse Walker are freed slaves who must decide whether to stay in the poisoned South to collect the "forty acres and a mule" that Sherman has promised them, or try their luck in the mysterious North. Arly and Will, meanwhile, are two good-for-nothing rebel deserters who become fast friends upon escaping from the Confederate prison where they were awaiting execution. After a series of darkly comic misadventures, they wind up working for Sartorius - and Arly eventually hits upon a purpose in life: to assassinate Sherman.
As we know, he fails, though Sherman was to suffer a deeper sort of assassination when he became immortalised as a manic-depressive butcher who erased for ever the notion that war could be a gallant undertaking. In the novel's most memorable scene, Sherman meets the formid-able tactician Johnston, whom he has at last defeated, after months of bloody, cat-and-mouse combat. "At that moment he recognised in Joe Johnston the West Point training that he felt as well brimming in himself . . . Suddenly, Sherman felt a great sympathy for his enemy." And rightly so, as, in many ways, that enemy is himself.
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