War regarded as human insanity, in bloody detail

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THE MARCH

By E. L. Doctorow

Random House, $25.95, 363 pages

REVIEWED BY VINCENT D. BALITAS

If History has taught anything, it is that democracies, no matter how political pundits idealize them, always have had violent, bloody births that can last for centuries. Civil Wars are part of their development because there is usually a faction that seeks to dominate and defeat all challengers by proving its prowess on the battlefield.

In his ambitious new novel, E. L. Doctorow, one of our most important writers, gives us insights into our Civil War and its lingering effects. Readers of Mr. Doctorow's previous fiction know they can rely on him not to shy from sensitive issues. From "Ragtime" to "World's Fair," from "Billy Bathgate" to "The Waterworks," he has looked at our history, showing, through characterization, how we have become the country we are today. We have watched his characters, assailed by uncontrollable events, struggle to make sense out of their lives, to survive in the temporal flux.

In "The March," Mr. Doctorow gives us a dynamic, though at times forced, look at Maj.-Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's march through Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina. Many characters, including Sherman himself, react to the horrors of war and to its oddly organized chaos. Some characters have walk-ons; some play key roles in the actions; some leave the march; some are killed by it. We meet soldiers of all ranks and uniforms, freed slaves, a journalist, a photographer, doctors and nurses, and plantation owners. However, there is nothing romanticized in this novel, though there are pockets of calm. Massacres, rapes, torture, looting, and all that is a part of every war are presented.

Some of the most horrific scenes, and there are quite a few, occur in a M.A.S.H. unit of the time. One character "didn't want to believe she was looking at a slimed heap of severed human arms and legs." The chief surgeon, however, "a European, with a medical degree from the University of Gottingen" sees opportunity: "If there was any compensation for the barbarity of war, it was an enriched practice. The plethora of casualties accelerated the rate of learning." (This is just one of the ways Mr. Doctorow includes other wars.)

The butchery of war is central to "The March." Each character, including the march itself, is a lens to focus us on the beastlike nature of war, and on how we go about our lives in the midst of its randomness. A British journalist, barely tolerated by a press-leery Sherman, has "one terrifying vision of antediluvian breakout. This was war as adventure, not war for a solemn cause. It was war at its purest, a mindless mass rage severed from any cause, ideal, or moral principle."