Howard Bahr

“They wandered aimlessly through the wreckage of the battlefield. Now and then a hand would claw at their trouser legs. Voices rose from the shadows, disembodied like voices in dreams. Some demanded relief, others begged; they asked for water or for a surgeon, they asked for mothers and sisters, these voices. Some begged to be shot. From all these the boys shrank in guilty horror.”

Confederate soldiers and friends from Mississippi, Bushrod, Jack, and Virgil, are part of the same company fighting the American Civil War. We follow them as they participate in the Battle of Franklin in Tennessee. Protagonist Bushrod meets Anna, whose cousin’s house is taken over and used as a field hospital. The plot revolves around a small number of characters. They have become war weary and seriously consider desertion.

I had never read anything by Howard Bahr before and was very impressed with his writing. The storyline illustrates the terrible death toll taken in the Civil War. It is does not touch on the causes. It is intensely focused on the relationships between friends. As may be expected in a book about war, it is extremely sad. It is a powerful story of attempting to retain human compassion in the midst of devastation.

“In the tricky, shifting light of the fire, the sleepers—Anna, Bushrod, and Nebo—seemed figures in a very old painting, caught in a vanished moment of repose. It was easy to believe that they might sleep forever, free of pain and grief and confusion, pardoned from all things and especially from tomorrow. They might never change—only the colors around them, already soft, yielding year by year to the benign erosion of time. It was an illusion, of course, for the constellations above were moving ahead of the sun, and the light of day would dissolve the shadows and awaken the sleepers to movement, to life or to death, as it always did. But for now they slept and dreamed, and their peace, for all its deception, was no less real to them.”… (meer)

Pelican Road is a screaming train ride of a book, with sharp curves and downhill grades that are taken at breakneck speeds, but it is a not a train you want to stop and not a train you wish to alight from until the bitter end. It follows the world of steam engine trains on the cusp of WWII and the men who run the route between Louisiana and Mississippi, most of them aging as are the trains themselves.

There was an added level of enjoyment for me, brought about by the fact of my brother being a railroad man back in the days when telegraph was still the method of communication and when handing off messages to the moving trains was still a practice. I have heard his stories of traveling the railways and staying the small towns up and down the Eastern Seaboard. I recognized some of the language and, while the time portrayed here is far earlier than my brother’s time, I could recognize the special camaraderie he felt with his fellow railroad men.

I cared about all of these men, flawed as they were, and loved them for their devotion to the job and to one another. I especially felt the connection to Artemus and Frank and thought the flashbacks to their war days added a level of depth and understanding to them that would have missed without that background.

What an amazing writer Howard Bahr is. His descriptive passages are remarkable in their ability to touch all your senses. At the same time, I felt no word was unnecessary or wasted. There was meaning in every sentence. Bahr is a careful writer, he is as careful and professional with his craft as those men he portrayed on the Pelican Road were with theirs.
… (meer)