Book Review: Judgment at Appomattox
/Judgment at Appomattox
by Ralph PetersForge, 2017Novelist Ralph Peters brings his grand five-volume fictional treatment of the American Civil War to a necessarily bittersweet conclusion in the Judgment at Appomattox, which follows the war to its desperate, thunderous conclusion at Appomattox Court House, when the Union army under General Grant finally forces the surrender of the ragged Confederate forces under General Lee. The book is both a headlong action-tale and a knowing pastiche of its period's self-consciously florid prose – a combination first crafted by Michael Shaara in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Killer Angels over 40 years ago, and since that novel has haunted every subsequent Civil War novel like Banquo's ghost, it hovers over Judgment at Appomattox too. Shaara made the action visceral and disorienting, the characters intimately fallible, and the moral dividing lines faint and porous; as templates go, these are pretty good ones.Peters shows readers the action of the war's final weeks from many different viewpoints, ranging from the famous names like General Sheridan or George Armstrong Custer to the everyman soldiers on both sides, like Irish Confederate Danny Riordan, whose moment-by-moment battlefield experiences lend a vivid immediacy to the battlefield realities created by the iconic generals in their tents:
By the light of the last Yankee musket flash, he saw Daniel Keegan before him, bereft of his tin whistle now but with stripes sewn to his sleeve, promoted while Riordan rotted in Yankee prison pens, one and then another, taken not once in the war, but twice, to his mortification, and worth a fight it was when a man claimed that he'd been swept up three times, for third time there had been none, just sickness in a hospital hungry for corpses.
But this is a plaintive, even mournful novel rather than a rousing one. The Union forces swarm everywhere, with a grim-faced man-waster as their leader, and at every turn, from battlefield defeats to the fall of Richmond to the scrabbling, running retreats across blasted landscapes, readers see a Confederate army operating on pure nerve, starving and clothed in rags, sometimes crazed and often weighing the certainty of defeat against the shame of surrender. The book's most riveting scene is over in a flash, with a Confederate general finally confronting General Lee with the catastrophe that's now his sole responsibility, but Peters provides many moments in which Confederate battlefield leaders seeing their scrubby heroes melt away:
He watched a shriveled regiment hasten to extend the line again, their numbers paltry, uniforms patched, and eyes grim. Not enough of anything these days. Even looking at those men ran bitter.And shameful. Not sure he'd ever get over it, live it down. Seeing his own men surrender by the company, almost by the regiment, his good old division just quitting. Men he'd praised as having “lice in their hair and fire in their hearts,” men as brave as any who'd ever saluted. So many hadn't bothered to run off, merely gave themselves up. Just like that.“Ignominious.” That was the fancied-up word.
The famous scene at the end of the war – the meeting of Generals Lee and Grant to parlay at Appomattox – is one of those moments in history that no fiction can improve, and Peters wisely doesn't try. The somber moments – the Southern soldiers being allowed to keep their small arms and their dignity, the Northern soldiers saluting the bravery of their counterparts, the inexplicable decision on Grant's part not to pull out his sidearm and shoot Lee between the eyes at point-blank range right there in the McLean House parlor – are presented almost plainly, and then Peters' “Battle Hymn” cycle is over. This final installment is the strongest of the series.
