The March

THE MARCH

By E. L. DOCTOROW

Little, Brown, 2006, 367 pp, $29.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

Arly, a Rebel soldier in the Confederate States Army, disguised as a Union Army photographer, has a crazy plan to assassinate Union General William Tecumseh Sherman, the destroyer of the south. For Arly’s black assistant, Calvin, the Civil War has now become personal and Arly must be stopped.

Exploring war and race, E. L. Doctorow’s latest novel, The March, moves to this one climax of many in a kaleidoscopic montage of people and plots. There is no central character in The March, unless it is the march itself, Sherman’s 60,000 strong ‘March to the Sea’ in 1864 at the end of the Civil War, a military “scythe of destruction”, razing and burning all before it in a scorched-earth, ‘total war’campaign of conquest through the southern states of America. But there is also another march, the “black march to freedom”, a precarious and far from straight line march.

These two marches pick up, uproot, discard, destroy and liberate a populous cast. Georgia plantation slave-owners have their world shattered. Their newly-freed slaves struggle to cease thinking like slaves, to assert equality with their former owners, to realise that their liberation journey has only just started because they are “still black in a white world”.

Daring to hope for the future is Pearl, the light-coloured slave-girl and illegitimate daughter of a Georgia slave-owner, passing as a white drummer-boy in Sherman’s army and then working as Army nurse to Colonel Wrede Sartorius. This surgeon who detests the drilling and saluting and “all the other hierarchical warrior nonsense”, wins the love of Emily, a southern refugee - “North or South, military or civilian – he made no distinctions … He was like some god trying to staunch the flow of human disaster”.

For Sherman’s bulldozing march, speed was all. Designed to live unencumbered through organised “foraging” parties, the army yet found a new ‘encumbrance’– 25,000 freed slaves who attached themselves to it. For Sherman, they were military baggage and a political problem (was this war about freeing the slaves, or not?). Some northern military heroes, however, did not trouble their conscience. For General Kilpatrick, devoid of any“thoughtful sensibility”, the war never rises above self-enrichment and the exercise of military, sexual and racial authority.

“Moral dismantlement” affects the rank and file of the liberators, too. Drunken revenge propels Sherman’s soldiers to arson, lootings and rape, justified in response to a South-caused war that had made them wretchedly cold and hungry, and which disrupted, and still threatened to end, their lives. Yet soldiers “of rank no higher than sergeant”, observes London Timesreporter, Hugh Pryce, stop to discuss substantive moral issues in the middle of a foraging expedition, “walking about and talking among themselves like a peripatetic school of Aristotelian philosophers”, debating whether destruction was due a particular planter for his abuse of their slave-freeing mission.

Of all his characters, it is perhaps with the Union soldier, Albion Simms, where the arbitrary cruelty of war reaches its most elegiac, poetic and saddest expression in Doctorow’s hands. Simms has a spike lodged in his brain, and is excruciatingly aware of his powerlessness to do anything about his mental disintegration until one last tragic act of conscious will.

Although Doctorow is clearly on the side of the Union (as was, indeed, Karl Marx and most progressives then and since), the solemn cause of this war does not make it good because, whatever its rightness, war at its heart is about people killing and brutally maiming other people. Each life lost in The March draws Doctorow’s anguished sympathy yet he also honours the historic grandeur of the war in its necessarily interlinked intention to preserve the Union and abolish slavery. The march, reflects General Sherman, made every battle for "every field and swamp and river and road into something of moral consequence”.

Forsaking conventional structure can risk turning a novel into an avant-garde mess but Doctorow mostly avoids the pitfalls of unfocussed narrative and diluted characterisation through his artistic choreography of his voluminous cast, and through his lyricism which invests almost every cameo with profound allegorical meaning. Don’t come to The March expecting the conventional historical novel. But do expect a literary encounter that will illuminate the many meanings of the American Civil War.