On Nov. 2, 1864, General Sherman wrote to General Grant: “I am clearly of opinion that the best results will follow my contemplated movement through Georgia.” A fortnight after Sherman’s curiously cold-blooded dispatch, Atlanta was ablaze and 60,000 blue-bellies were preparing for their leveling march across Georgia and the Carolinas to the Atlantic coast.
E. L. Doctorow’s The March strives, with fairly scrupulous fidelity, to bring this campaign into relief, both by giving it a human face and by showing it to be pitiless, anarchic and inhuman.
Neither strategy wholly succeeds. It sometimes feels as if Mr. Doctorow’s fiction wants to be a movie before it has been a book. No surprise, given the popularity of Ragtime and Billy Bathgate, both of which indeed became films. But in this case, the schematic treatment drains blood from the cast: a headstrong, beautiful (Halle Berry-like) freed slave, a pair of bumbling buddy-movie Rebel soldiers, a goatish general in pursuit of virginal debutantes, a surgeon who doesn’t know how to love. These aren’t people. They’re props. They march the tale along but rarely move the reader.
That’s in spite of Mr. Doctorow’s slathering his prose with sentimentality and awkward philosophizing. The surgeon, Sartorius, delivers this stoned-grad student appraisal of the march: “Imagine a great segmented body moving in contractions and dilations at a 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.” Tubular, indeed.
Sherman, who sacked cities and slaughtered graybacks, discovers an officer upbraiding a drummer boy (the slave girl incognito) and intervenes sympathetically, saying to her: “Sometimes I want to cry, too.” Don’t bother looking for this anecdote in his memoirs.
Yet Sherman did famously say that war is hell, and the book underscores this maxim with a seriousness of purpose that almost redeems its flaws. After negotiating with a defeated Confederate general, Sherman calls the conflict “but a war after a war, a war before a war.” The seeming inevitability of war is a powerful theme, but Mr. Doctorow does not trot it out as pacifist agitprop. The fighting in The March, even in its savage excess, takes place within a moral frame. Rightly or wrongly, its characters generally feel themselves called to a higher purpose. Thus readers who seek a critique of our present-day war in Mr. Doctorow’s novel will feel disappointed. He seems to concede, grudgingly, that war is not always murder but sometimes duty.