The Judas Field

"Howard Bahr is an excellent writer, but his fiction isn’t as well known as that of other writers on my list. That’s a shame, as The Judas Field is one of the best Civil War novels published during the twenty-first century. In particular, it does a fine job of responding to the human legacy of America’s military conflicts. Set in the mid-1880s, the frame narrative portrays the return of three Confederate veterans to the battlefield at Franklin, Tennessee. Tasked by a friend with recovering the bodies of her long-buried father and brother, soldiers killed in the 1864 battle, the men are overwhelmed with flashbacks of the horrific fighting years earlier. The narrative sways back and forth between the present day and the war twenty years earlier, and in doing so documents the psychic damage left in the wake of an awful trauma. Bahr’s veterans live with survivor’s guilt each day, haunted by bad memories and suffering from alcoholism and drug addiction. Some live on the brink of a physical and mental collapse. Himself a veteran of the Vietnam War , Bahr’s portrait of Civil War veterans lines up with what we know of veterans of America’s later wars – men and women haunted by post-traumatic stress disorder and often nursing old wounds. By reimaging what it meant to be a Civil War veteran, Bahr complicates the prevailing picture of those men as nostalgic old-timers more than happy to walk their old battlefields and refight their old battles. The result, especially for scholars who study veterans’ lives and memoirs, is instructive. The Judas Field helps us better understand what it meant to wear the label of ‘veteran’ in the decades after 1865, and to better appreciate the long-term sacrifices made by those persons who returned from the Civil War. We might say that this and similar works of fiction lend insight into ‘The Long War,’ a term some scholars use for the war’s legacy well beyond its official ending in 1865. Fictional responses to the American Civil War are so numerous and diverse that it can be risky to generalize. But I would say that the primary interest of fiction writers – whether in 1895 or 2024 – has been to grant the reader some measure of personal access to the conflict. Earlier fiction, such as that by Crane, sought to put the reader in the shoes of a soldier amidst the crash of battle. In doing so, those texts reflected the prevailing thinking that only men in uniform had truly experienced the war. Later fictions expanded outward from there, granting readers access to the lives of women and other civilians on the home front – persons who participated in the conflict in different yet still tremendously important ways. Still later works have wanted readers to experience something of what it meant to be slave, or an abolitionist, or a psychologically damaged veteran. These works have come to value the historical contributions of a wide range of Americans, reflecting our nation’s increasingly democratic approach to its past and, ideally, to its future."