The closing days of war are usually its most gruesome. By then moral positions have collapsed on the battlefield. War’s inevitable separation into good and evil of ordinary, normally peaceloving men has demolished the sense of purpose with which they were bid farewell back home. Honour among combatants is in tatters. Desperation and desolation extract inhuman excesses from retreating armies. Those on the threshold of victory commit themselves to swift, triumphant — and therefore brutal — operations. Both, in those bedraggled moments, take their battle beyond the field into homes and main streets. And it is there that they leave the most lethal scars.In his new novel E.L. Doctorow takes us along on General William Tecumseh Sherman’s 1864 march to seal the Union’s victory. After he set Atlanta on fire, Sherman led his men through Georgia and the Carolinas. In Doctorow’s telling, the procession acquires a life of its own. As the general and his sixty thousand troops march on, overcoming remnants of Confederate resistance, sweeping thought the South’s lush plantations, housing themselves in others’ homesteads, carrying off food and destroying what cannot be carted, they acquire new marchers.Slaves freed by fleeing masters await the march’s arrival, turned out in their Sunday best and thrilled at the prospect of being borne along to a different future. White refugees attach themselves to the march — some at first meeting tingling with humane exchange and others because they can flee the unionists no more.The soldiers try to free themselves from these uninvited encumbrances. After all, they have a war to wage. But the march is its own creature: “Imagine a great segmented body moving in contractions and dilations at the rate of twelve or fifteen miles a day, a creature of a hundred thousand feet. It is tubular in its being and tentacled to the roads and bridges over which it travels. It sends out as antennae its men on horses. It consumes everything in its path. It is an immense organism, this army, with a small brain. That would be General Sherman.”This immense, fearsome organism naturally embraces a great cast of characters. Doctorow, as he earlier showed in Ragtime, is a master of the quick characterisation. His prose has so much energy, his ear for cadence and inflection immediately sets apart each person he introduces, his flair for drama gives each one a part of the grand narrative. And really, his wit locates humanity in extreme circumstances.So, there is the “white negro” girl, Pearl, who prays to God: “An me, yore Pohrl, teach me to be free.” On this march she will learn to be free by adopting identities — little drummer boy, for instance. She will gain a measure of her racial mix by trying to raise a black boy. She will reveal the rare human facet to Sherman. And she will be empowered to begin acquiring an education and an ambition. The question Doctorow poses is this: can one fight a war with liberal objectives while clinging fiercely to notions of us and them? There is, in contrast, Emily, daughter of a Georgia Supreme Court justice. She will align herself to the march, smitten by the caring of an eccentric surgeon, recompensed for her losses by the equality of suffering in the nursing ward. There are, then, Arly and Will, changing uniform to ensure survival, and through their wacky dialogue revealing what is really most dangerous about war: its accumulation of the absurd.And at the heart of it all, there is General Sherman, his crude megalomania punctuated with bursts of kindness to Pearl, hoping his civilian bosses would leave war to warriors and confine their role to hailing each victory, not demanding explanations for brutality: “I have a cause. I have a command. And what I do I do well. And, God help me, but I am thrilled to be praised by my peers and revered by my countrymen. There are men and nations, there is right and wrong. There is this Union. And it must not fall.”Here it is, Doctorow’s genius. There is still distrust between north and south in the United States. In these engaging stories, in fiction that distills the deeper truth from history, he captures the making and power of collective memory. And, of course, there is America’s current war. The question The March poses is this: can one fight a war with liberal objectives while clinging fiercely to notions of us and them?
