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Books: Connecticut Yankee

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TIME

A VOLUNTEER’S ADVENTURES (237 pp.) —John William De Forest—Edited by James H. Croushore—Yale ($3).

The great national experience of the 19th Century was the Civil War, yet it is an odd fact that no major U.S. novelist fought in the war. U.S. literature is the poorer for it. Hawthorne was in his late fifties when the war began, in his grave before it ended. Stephen Crane, who wrote the great Civil War novel ( The Red Badge of Courage) without ever seeing a battle, was born in 1871. Howells spent the war years as U.S. consul at Venice. Melville languished with his poverty and sciatica in Pittsfield, Mass, and in Manhattan. Henry James was a studious young semi-invalid in Newport, R.I. and at Harvard. Mark Twain, after a brief, inglorious spell as a Confederate volunteer, took off for the newspaper offices and mining camps of Nevada and California.

Connecticut-born John William De Forest (1826-1906) was one of a handful of novelists who saw actual Civil War combat. An utter military greenhorn at the start, he saw plenty of fighting before he was through, including the long siege of Port Hudson (below Vicksburg) and Sheridan’s last-minute victory at Cedar Creek, Va. His best-known novel, Miss Ravenel’s Conversion (1867), is among the few hardheaded and realistic war stories of its time. Any doubts as to De Forest’s realism ought to be ended by A Volunteer’s Adventures.

Line Officer. Subtitled A Union Captain’s Record of the Civil War, this is brisk military reporting, some of it so fresh that it is hard to believe it dates from muzzle-loading, paper-cartridge days. Commissioned a captain in the Twelfth Connecticut Volunteers in 1862, De Forest served first as a line officer, later as a divisional staff officer. He wrote long, gossipy letters home to his wife, also a number of magazine articles, and subsequently edited both letters and articles into book-length form. The manuscript was left among his papers and is now published for the first time.

World War II veterans will spot the old Army magic on almost every page. Early in 1862 De Forest and his men went South by steam transport. The hold was so packed that the troops could just about stretch their legs on their blankets. Once ashore on an island off the Mississippi coast, they had tents but no tent pegs (the pegs had been left in Boston). There was drill day after day, with the Brigadier himself, a Vermonter, roaring commands: “Why don’t you dress, men! Come up, come up into line, I say! There! did it hurt ye? What the hell are you abeout?”

New Orleans fell shortly; the Twelfth Connecticut moved in. Soon all the men who could manage it were “drunk as pipers.” Everybody swore superbly—even those “who are members of the church,” De Forest noted (“it is wonderful how profane an army is”). There was the usual rich tactical confusion: “We march like fury for hours; and then nothing comes of it; we march back again. Of course the general understands it all, and perhaps Omniscience does, but nobody else.” There were heartfelt gripes about high life in rear echelons: “It seems outrageous that, while we of the field regiments have been stick-in-the-muds for months . . . these fellows should have elegant houses, cellars full of choice wines, encouragement to plunder, and generous promotions.”

De Forest never got a promotion during the war, but no Civil War general has left a better account of the sounds of battle: of “the slow pumming” of distant artillery, of “the jiz, jiz, jiz [of] the shells over our heads,” of the “continuous rattle . . . like that which a boy makes in running a stick along a picket fence, only vastly louder,” of Confederate musket fire. Born with no great passion for “the high cockalorum of heroism,” De Forest wrote frankly of the nuisance of being shot at, of the multiple woes of a company-grade officer’s life.

His Adventures is full of little scenes as honest as an untouched Brady photograph. Sample: a couple of “undersized” officers talk together near some fieldworks in Virginia in 1864. The younger man, with “a distinctly Irish face of the puffy sort,” gesticulates with his fingers, his elbows pressed close to his sides. The elder, “blond and sandy-bearded,” with “perfectly inexpressive, redoak” features, stands staring at the ground. “That youngest one is our General Sheridan,” says.a sergeant proudly. “Don’t you know who the other is? That’s GRANT.”

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