Books: Rebel Richmond

BUGLES BLOW NO MORE— Clifford Dowdey—Little, Brown ($2.50).

Unreconstructed Southerners regard the Civil War as a series of tragic blunders, can still wonder what the outcome might have been if Bragg had not been so dilatory after Chickamauga, if Longstreet had not been so slow at Gettysburg, if Lee’s genius had not been hamstrung by Jefferson Davis’ defensive policy. Even some Northerners, looking around at what the U. S. has become and back at what the South was, can see that the Civil War might have been a tragic mistake, can wonder whether reducing the South to the lowest common denominator of the Union was worth four years of blood and ruin. Both these points of view are implicit in Bugles Blow No More, which last week added one to the growing number of historical romances about the Civil War.

Like Gone With The Wind and Boy in Blue, Bugles Blow No More strings its beads of action on the thin thread of a love story. The scene is Richmond, second capital of the Confederacy; from Secession Night to Appomattox. In 1861 Richmond was gay, prosperous, confident, the established capital of an established civilization. Between Mildred Wade, daughter of an aristocrat, and Brose Kirby, a clerk in her father’s tobacco warehouse, was a social abyss nothing short of an earthquake could wipe out. But it was earthquake weather, and both of them felt it. Before Brose marched off to war as a private in the soon-to-be-famed First Virginia Regiment, Mildred sought him out in the dusty camp just to tell him that she would have nothing to do with him. Then came the Battle of Manassas, the earthquake’s first tremor.

When McClellan invaded the Peninsula, fought his way almost to the outskirts of Richmond, social abysses began to close and the sacred soil of Virginia cracked open in other places. Before the terrible Seven Days’ Battle was over, the abyss between Mildred and Brose was almost closed with corpses in grey. By the time McClellan drew off his battered army and Lee invaded Maryland, Mildred had painfully confessed to Brose that she loved him.

Brose was a dangerous character, a fighting fool. With the “Bloody First” he got plenty of danger and many a fight: Second Manassas, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, Petersburg. At Gettysburg Brose was in the charge that reached the highwater mark of the Confederacy inside the stone wall on Cemetery Ridge, led a handful of survivors safely back. Long before Appomattox he knew there was no hope left, but like many a butternut veteran was willing to go on. Mildred could hardly recognize as her fire-eating lover the tattered scarecrow that came limping into smoke-blackened, ruined Richmond after Lee’s surrender. Broken, beaten, he could still wish that Lee had ordered them to fight on. Even now that the bugles would blow no more, he could think of nothing but the war that had been his life; his proudest memory would always be that as the Old Man rode slowly by for the last time, he had reached out and touched his stirrup.

As a love story, Bugles Blow No More is hardly Grade A, but it is in its historical detail that Author Dowdey’s tale really tells. No personal romance nor individual tragedy could outweigh the gradual disintegration of a city, and the characters in Bugles Blow No More are simply the actors, almost the chorus. Better than the facts of any history book, Author Dowdey’s homely, personal details plot the long graph of Richmond’s decline and fall&#1511etters written on wall paper, with ink made from soot; James River shad at $20 apiece; corn meal at $80 a bushel; bacon at $10 a pound. By 1864 flour was selling for $1,000 a barrel. One gold U. S. dollar could buy 100 Confederate banknotes. Wits took baskets to market to carry their money, a purse to put the food in.

The Author. Richmond-born, Clifford Dowdey traces his ancestry back to a 17th Century Virginia soldier. Says he of his family: “Not a Bland nor a Lee nor a Carter nor a Randolph in the lot … but, my God, the stuff that hewed Virginia out of the wilderness, made its cities, and marched with Lee. . . . When I think of Virginia, I think of my people, who never bothered to be important, but made this State what it was.”