Army of the Cumberland

BOY IN BLUE--Royce Brier--Appleton-Century ($2.50).

Northerners called it the Rebellion; Southerners, the War between the States. Historians refer to it as the Civil War. But what plain folks called it while it was going on, few Northerners or Southerners or historians can now tell convincingly. To roll back time 75 years is a trick only artists can perform. Evelyn Scott has had a good try. Last week Newshawk Royce Brier had another. A Pulitzer Prizeman (for his story of the Brooke Hart kidnappers, 1934). he went at his bigger story in first-rate newshawk fashion. 1937 readers of Boy in Blue may not get exactly the same news as 1863 readers of the Cincinnati Gazette but they will get an approximation of the same feelings.

Like all good reporters, Royce Brier went thoroughly over his story's ground. Boy in Blue was three years writing. took Author Brier step by step over the Tennessee battlefields he tells about. And, like Stephen Crane, who had never seen a battle when he wrote his war masterpiece, The Red Badge of Courage, Royce Brier reports fighting not as a tricky tit-tat-toe of tactics but a muddled melee of men. To stay-at-homes with a clear wrong view, the war might seem a campaign, a crusade, a cause; but to the men who did its manual labor it was "a bellyache, a confused strife for boxcar space, a useless march, a grudge at troopers and gunners and wagoneers, a surfeit of hills and towns and faces and sunshine and rain of the Cumberland Valley. It was too many men and too few women, it was homesickness and yet wanderlust, and a cut finger which was slow to heal."

Robert Thane was second son to a pious Abolitionist farmer in Indiana. His older brother went to the war and came back minus an arm. But Robert might have waited for the draft if his hero-brother had not stolen his girl from him. When that happened, he went off hoping for death at the first cannon's mouth. Long before he got into his first battle he learned that there was more to soldiering than stopping a bullet. A Creole camp-follower in Nashville did her share in dimming Diana's image. And in his first skirimish Robert found there were too many things happening to think about glorious death. The first sight of a Confederate charge was too much for Robert and his pals; they ran like stags. And there was nothing glorious in being wounded: he thought someone had punched him in the side with a sharp stick.

Ann, who nursed Robert back to health, was the daughter of a divided family. Her father was on Longstreet's staff; her two brothers were fighting for the North. More than her Southern ancestry divided her from Robert. He felt himself an ignorant yokel compared to her; but before his furlough ended he knew he loved her. By the time he got back to the Army of the Cumberland, Ann had followed her father down into Georgia, inside the Confederate lines. But those were the days when Confederate lines were drawing in. Just before the two armies fumbled their way into a big battle, Robert found Ann again. Next day, with his fellow-privates of the 157th Indiana, he fought and ran and came back to fight again. When the interminable day was ended he neither knew nor cared which side had won: all he thought about as the surgeon gave him chloroform was, not to let them cut off his leg at the knee, and Ann.

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