It is May, 1864, and Union troops under Grant are making a determined push into Virginia. In a moment of quiet, a lull before battle begins, a Union and a Confederate unit meet. The Union troops form part of the 14th Brooklyn, a motley crew of Irish, English and German stock, ragged and exhausted and left behind on picket duty to guard their army's flank. Relaxing with baseball and bat, they are taken by surprise when a company of Alabama infantry emerges from the woods, but instead of engaging in warfare, the opposing soldiers decide to play a series of baseball games. Thus begins Thomas Dyja's fine novel of the American Civil War, in which the author strives to show that a basic humanity can exist between ordinary men even when they are poised upon a rim of fire. War very often changes its combatants, but it can also instil in them the urge to stay the same, to honour the old verities, and to cling to being the people they were before the holocaust began. This is a volume to rank beside Crane's The Red Badge of Courage and Frazier's Cold Mountain, a war novel that preaches anti-war.
By Vincent Banville