Cass Wakefield and others from his Mississippi town fought many battles along the way to the big one at Franklin, TN. Those who survived the horrors of maiming and death were never the same. In 1885 a childhood friend asks him to take her back to the battlefield so she can recover the bodies of her father and brother. Because she is dying, he reluctantly agrees. They are followed by two others wounded physically and emotionally by the battle, and along the way memories flood back as they pass the sites of other skirmishes.
Much of the book is told in the time of the war and this is where the heart of the book beats. I have read a lot of Civil War books, fiction and non-fiction, first-person historical accounts included. Yet nothing touched me as deeply as this book. I love this author's writing, his command of sense of place, his knack for eliciting wrenching emotions. At times, I stopped and flipped back through pages I'd just read so I could read them again more slowly, and sometimes I did this yet again.
How best to describe my thoughts on this? Since even those first person accounts that fill the historical books didn't draw such emotions, and since this is Howard Bahr's 2nd book on Franklin, I can only say that perhaps he is the reincarnation of a soldier who fought the battle, come back as a writer so he could tell his tale. And maybe what he had that the soldiers didn't that make his telling so vivid, is that in this incarnation he has an education, thus he has the words. Malarkey? Maybe, maybe not.
A beautiful story.
Much of the book is told in the time of the war and this is where the heart of the book beats. I have read a lot of Civil War books, fiction and non-fiction, first-person historical accounts included. Yet nothing touched me as deeply as this book. I love this author's writing, his command of sense of place, his knack for eliciting wrenching emotions. At times, I stopped and flipped back through pages I'd just read so I could read them again more slowly, and sometimes I did this yet again.
How best to describe my thoughts on this? Since even those first person accounts that fill the historical books didn't draw such emotions, and since this is Howard Bahr's 2nd book on Franklin, I can only say that perhaps he is the reincarnation of a soldier who fought the battle, come back as a writer so he could tell his tale. And maybe what he had that the soldiers didn't that make his telling so vivid, is that in this incarnation he has an education, thus he has the words. Malarkey? Maybe, maybe not.
A beautiful story.
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