Sunday 5 December 2010

The valley of death


Dedicated to Ike Jakson

Try to imagine a place worse than Dachau. It’s impossible, you say. Then imagine, if you will, Dachau just as overcrowded but without the huts, without a clean water supply, without any kind of sanitation; just a palisade with watchtowers around an open field. Imagine people, thousands of people, suffering in confined conditions under an open sky, winter and summer, the only source of water being a marshy stream which rapidly turns into a sewer, a breeding ground for maggots and disease. This is not Germany; this is not Dachau. This is America; this is Andersonville.

Thanks to Ike Jakson, a fellow blogger, I’ve read Andersonville, the 1955 Pulitzer Prize winning novel by MacKinlay Kantor. It’s set during the American Civil War, for the most part in and around Andersonville, a prisoner of war camp near the town of Anderson in Georgia, which opened in February 1864. In just over twenty-six acres thousands of Union prisoners were penned as in a zoo, with no shelter other than their own rough shebangs, holes dug in the ground, covered with blankets or coats propped up with sticks. In the year or so it was open an estimated 45 thousand men passed through its gates; almost 13 thousand never passed out again, other than to the grave, dead of malnutrition, neglect, malaria, diarrhoea, scurvy and gangrene.

Andersonville is a powerful novel, one of the most powerful I’ve ever read, and I say that without a trace of exaggeration. Kantor spent years on background research, evidenced in his writing, material he handles with ease, fully digested, unlike so many other historical novels. It could, given the subject, have been an angry book, a bleak book, but it’s not; it’s a book full of gentle understanding and humanity. There are parts that are difficult to read, there is real horror, but there is nothing lurid, nothing overstated in Kantor’s treatment.


It’s a mixture of fact and fiction, a mixture of real people and wholly believable characters: unforgettable characters like Ira Claffey and his daughter Lucy, who live on a plantation close to the camp, and Nathan Dreyfoos, a cultured man, a Union prisoner, carried to Andersonville by chance and fate. There are others, large and small, people the author takes from their homes and guides them through his pages, sometimes invisible, other times not. It’s a story, in so many ways, of intersected lives and intersected destinies.

In Dachau the Nazis imposed a brutish order, with guards in the camp and designated block orderlies. In Andersonville, or Camp Sumter, to give its official name, there was no order or policing. The authorities stayed outside for the most part, allowing the prisoners to manage the best they could. The worst was a kind of jungle, a Darwinian struggle of the strong against the weak.

For me this was the most depressing part of the story, that predatory gangs known as Raiders organised themselves to steal from their already impoverished comrades, not stopping short of murder. This is not fiction; this really happened and it continued to happen until other prisoners formed their own police force, the Regulators, imposing a kind of order in the midst of misery. The order went so far as trying and condemning the leaders of the Raiders, a process carried out with the cooperation of the camp authorities.

The authority, the person with immediate responsibility for Andersonville, was one Captain Henry Wirz, of Swiss German origin, the only person convicted and executed after the Civil War of what we now refer to as war crimes. Kantor does not condemn him, no; he merely presents him as a self-pitying, ineffectual and rather wretched little man, an obvious scapegoat. His greater culprit is General John H Winder,responsible for the whole of the Confederate prison system, depicted as a callous and brutish individual who, along with his son, is alleged to have deliberately engineered death by neglect.

It’s as well to remember, though, that Andersonville is a novel, not a history. In the spirit of poetic licence some liberties are taken with the facts. There is not the least doubt about the callous indifference with which many of the Confederate authorities perceived the Union prisoners, but the camp opened at a time when the Southern state itself was dying; at a time when supply was breaking down, when shortages were commonplace; a time when even soldiers in the field went hungry. This is not to excuse what happened at Andersonville, to excuse the dehumanisation, merely to offer a wider understanding.

Of the dozens of novels I’ve read this year Andersonville is by far the best, only equalled by Vassily Grossman’s Life and Fate, by coincidence another account set against a background of war. Kantor writes in a lucid and compelling fashion, a narrative that quickly engages and carries one along. He writes in a wholly believable way about wholly believable people. Some books are instantly forgettable, no matter how enjoyable. This is a book that cannot be forgotten, one destined to leave a perpetual afterimage in my mind.





21 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  2. It is brilliantly done, Anastasia. Other historians should read you and I can say this because I know the book and the area.

    I will need time to read it a few times as I did with the book and report in again to see what others say.

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  3. Ana, check out this, too:

    http://www.censusdiggins.com/prison_camp_douglas.html

    I have visited some of the American Civil War sites. There is a former prison camp just across the river from the foundry in Richmond, VA. Thousands of men held in appalling conditions on a tiny acreage. As the war dragged on, both prisoners and guards became dehumanized. And this in the midst of a conflict over the principles of liberty and rights.

    Better to find yourself victim of a ruthless brigand than in the hands of a zealot determined to do you good. The former can be bribed or persuaded, the latter will go to any extreme to 'save' you.

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  4. Yes, generally speaking I don’t like the historical novel genre either. Most, I find, are far too ambitious, cramming in too much detail and manipulating characters into all sorts of unbelievable situations, placing them here, there and everywhere. Andersonville is a long book, almost eight hundred pages long, an epic, by any standard, but it has a verisimilitude and intimacy that so many others do not. A really super read.

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  6. Thanks, Ike. As I said on your own blog, but for you I many never have come across this tremendous novel.

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  7. Calvin, yes, absolutely correct. Many thanks for that link.

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  8. All Nations have comitted their share of attrocities which is unfortunate but true. The union did pretty much the same, but they won so they got to demonize the Confederates .Sound familiar?

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  9. Amntnony, I hardly think the prosecution of a single captain constitutes a 'demonisation'. On the whole the Union behaved decently towards the defeated South, evidenced by Grant's treatment of Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox.

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  10. William Shatner appears in a great dramatisation related to this topic. Check it out at Amazon:

    http://www.amazon.com/Andersonville-Trial-Broadway-Theatre-Archive/dp/B0000A0DTC

    Andersonville is part of an omnibus of three Civil War novels, "Three great novels of the Civil War" edited by Marc Jaffe (1994). It includes Killer Angels by Micael Shaara (on Gettysburg) and Red Badge of Courage.

    Although I appreciated the teleplay I found the novel in question was too depressing/distressing to read.

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  11. "Try to imagine a place worse than Dachau. It’s impossible, you say."

    No, I wouldn't say it's impossible to imagine, even if I only heard of Andersonville through your blog. Dachau, as a labor camp, was by no means one of the worst, deadliest or biggest concentration camps in Nazi Germany. Although it's infamous for being the first.

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  12. The high ranking officers from both sides most all went to West Point together and some served in the Mexican American war together. Yes, Grant was nobel with Lee aT Appomattox but there were atrocities on lower levels by the North, by Sherman and by irregular forces. Reconstruction after the war was a long and painful process (Politicaly) this led to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the south. Look up Northern Carpetbaggers and Southern Scalawags. After WW2 Eisenhower had his own Andersonville Like camps for German pows where 1,00000 died of neglect. In Iraq there was Abu Gard Where American Private interrogators (Exempt from military rules) Tortured and raped boys,women and men. Human nature does not change, depravity continues to this day. Take a Look at the social structure of the Bonabo Chimpanzee, connect the dots and tell me what you find.

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  13. Anastasia

    I will have something else for you here soon. In the meantime I agree with Adam that “clearly this epic is an exception to the rule.”

    Secondly, if I may just ask a short question, have you read ‘War and Remembrance’ by Herman Wouk? I will be on the lookout for your reply here.

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  14. Retarius, thank you for this information. I checked on Amazon UK and The Andersonville Trial is available on DVD but only as an import, requiring a North American or multi-region DVD player. In short I have no idea if that means I can play it on my computer or not!

    There is, however, a reasonably good movie called Andersonville, though not directly based on Kantor’s novel. It’s possible to watch it online (don’t download!) here www.free-tv-video-online.me Yes. I’ve read both Killer Angels and The Red Badge of Courage. I think Kantor’s book has qualities that exceeds both. It is distressing in parts, I agree, but still a tremendous piece of work, well worth the perseverance.

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  15. Jean Paul, you are absolutely right, but I chose Dachau deliberately because it was a labour camp. In defiance of my own question and response it would be possible to imagine something far worse than either Dachau or Andersonville: it would be possible to imagine Auschwitz. Or would it?

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  16. Anthony, I do have another Civil War blog which I intend to post tomorrow, written to mark the secession of South Carolina from the Union one hundred and fifty years ago. It alludes to some of the things you touch on.

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  17. Ike, I have not. I assume you are recommending it? In that case I will.

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  18. Yes Anastasia

    I would like you to read and review War and remembrance but take your time; it is a large tome compared to MacKinlay Kantor’s Andersonville.

    First however, please read my Post:

    http://ikejakson.wordpress.com/2010/12/07/book-review-%e2%80%93-a-short-summary-of-%e2%80%98sherman%e2%80%99s-march%e2%80%99-by-richard-wheeler/

    We are in a heat wave and I want to get off the computer but I will return here for a final comment on Andersonville.

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  19. Ana, If you have time, please get on Google Earth and go to "Andersonville Civil War Prison"

    Like many other places where unimaginable suffering took place, there are only thousands of peaceful graves to tell the story.

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  20. Ike, I shall. I really liked your Sherman blog. Once I've read the book in question I'll write an appraisal of that also. In the meantime I'm about to post another Civil War article with a touch or two of Southern prejudice. :-)

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  21. Cheech, I have. I've also visited the National Parks' site. I fully agree with what you say. Next time I'm in Georgia I intend to visit.

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