Seeing Charles's somber expression as he stared out the window into the sunlit meadows of evening, Duncan frowned. He was not yet comfortable in the Confederate officer's presence and wondered if he ever would be. Further, he wondered if Charles understood the ramifications of his decision. While the train was passing through one of the many small hamlets dotting the right of way in Maryland — Charles saw two demolished houses and a shell-blasted barn — Duncan cleared his throat.
"You know, my boy, this duty you plan to take on — serving in the regular army again — it won't be easy for a man of your background."
That drew blood. Charles chewed hard on his unlit cigar stub.
"I went through the Academy the same way you did, General. I'm a professional. I changed uniforms once. I can change a second time. It's all one country again, isn't it?"
"That's true. Still, not everyone will treat you as we both would wish. I'm only trying to warn you against the inevitable. Discourtesies. Insults —"
In a hard voice, Charles said, "I'll handle it." A flash of sunlight between low hills illuminated his ravaged face, unsmiling.
Duncan looked up, gratefully. "Ah — here's Maureen —"
The wet nurse appeared in the aisle, gently cradling the baby she had brought from her seat in second class. "He's awake, General. I thought perhaps you might like —" She stopped, plainly uncertain about which man to address.
"Give him to me." Then, catching himself, Charles said in a gentler way, "Thank you, Maureen."
With extreme care, he took the bundled shape into his arms, while Duncan leaned across to raise the corner of blanket with which Maureen had covered the infant's face while carrying him between cars. Duncan beamed, the picture of the proud great-uncle.
The pink-faced child regarded his father with wide eyes. Awed and fearful of somehow damaging him, Charles tried a tentative smile. The younger Charles grimaced and bawled. "Rock him, for God's sake," Duncan said.
That worked. Charles had never rocked a child, but he quickly caught on. The train passed through fields where a farmer walked behind his mule and plow in the dying daylight, turning new earth.
"Frankly, my boy," Duncan said, "although I'm extremely pleased the three of us are here together and headed where we are, I continue to admit to some astonishment. I felt that if you took your son, you would undoubtedly want to return to South Carolina and raise him as a Southerner."
The father stared at the older man. "Charles is an American. That's how I'll raise him."
Duncan harrumphed to signify acceptance, if not understanding. "He has a middle name, by the way."
"You didn't tell me that."
"It slipped my mind. This has hardly been an ordinary day. His full name is Charles Augustus. My niece chose it just before —"
He pressed a closed hand to his lips. Remembering was hard for him, too, Charles realized.
"Before her confinement. She said she had always loved the nickname Gus."
Feeling tears, Charles blinked several times. He gazed down at his son, whose face had mysteriously reddened, and taken on a puzzling appearance of strain. Duncan peeked at the infant. "Oh, I think we shall need the assistance of Maureen. Excuse me while I fetch her."
He stepped into the aisle. With great care, Charles touched his son's chin. The baby reached out and grasped his index finger. He drew it into his mouth and gnawed vigorously.
Duncan had already lectured Charles about the need for cleanliness. So far today, he had scrubbed his hands three times — something of a record in his adult life. He wiggled his finger. Charles Augustus gurgled. Charles smiled. With all of his attention on his son, he didn't see the rail fence that suddenly appeared beside the track or the feasting buzzards disturbed by the train and swirling upward, away from the rotting remains of a black horse.
The war has left a great gulf between what happened before it in our century and what has happened since. … It does not seem to me as if I am living in the country in which I was born.
AFTERWORD
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
So wrote Yeats in "Easter 1916." His nine words are the underpinning of this novel.
Love and War was not written to demonstrate, again, that war is hell, though it is; or to show slavery, again, as our most heinous national crime, though arguably it is. Both ideas figure in the story, and not in a small way. But this is meant to be a tale about change as a universal force and constant, told in terms of a group of characters living through the greatest redefinition of America, in the shortest time, that we have ever experienced: the Civil War.
In his book Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction, Professor James McPherson of Princeton splendidly characterizes the war as "the central event in the American historical consciousness. ... [It] preserved this nation from destruction and determined, in large measure, what sort of nation it would be. The war settled two fundamental issues ... whether [the United States] was to be a nation with a sovereign national government, or a dissoluble confederation of sovereign states; and whether this nation, born of a declaration that all men are created with an equal right to liberty, was to continue to exist as the largest slave-holding country in the world."
Beyond the essential element of a strong narrative, I felt the book needed three things if it were to do its job.
First, it needed detail. And not the detail of the more familiar events, either. As the book developed from a first draft on my typewriter through the final draft on my IBM PC, a new mental signboard was hung where I couldn't miss it. (The permanent signboard, very old now, reads: Storytelling first.) The new one said: Not Gettysburg again.
The details I wanted were many from what I call the byways: the fascinating places novels about the Civil War seldom go. To the bottom of Charleston harbor, for instance, where the astonishing and astonishingly small, submersible Hunley forecast a dramatic change in naval warfare. Into the bureaucracy and the cavalry camps. To the work sites of an engineer battalion and a military railroad track crew. Inside Libby Prison, over to Liverpool, and back to the Ordnance Department in Washington, with its permanent parade of inventors, some sane, many mad. I even wanted to go onto a camp stage to show a bit of the Civil War equivalent of a USO show; the skit that Charles and Ab watch is authentic.
Hoping that what interests me would interest readers, I chose a number of these lesser-known byways and began the search, which took a year. There is certainly no shortage of material. Quoting McPherson again, "Perhaps it is simply because the conflict was so astonishingly, rich and varied that it is inexhaustible." Historian Burke Davis observed that "more than 100,000 volumes of [Civil War literature] have failed to tell the tale to the satisfaction of ... readers." Or of writers, for that matter. I could see no way to include a relatively recent, fascinating finding that in England, in the desperate late hours of the Confederacy, operatives may have developed a primitive two-stage guided missile. The device was allegedly shipped to a site in Virginia, then tested and fired at Washington. The burning of records in Richmond consumed whatever report may have been made of the missile's performance, and we have no evidence that it struck or even came close to its target or, indeed, any evidence that it existed at all. No room for that story. And many more.