The Stockade

ANDERSONVILLE (767 pp.)--MacKinlay Kantor--World ($5).

Whether a soldier wore blue or grey during the Civil War, about the worst thing that could happen to him was to be taken prisoner. In Southern camps, 15 of every 100 Federals died; in the North, twelve out of every 100 Confederates died. But even in a day when most camps were shocking, the name of Andersonville most specifically spelled horror. Within this Georgia stockade, 100 miles south of Atlanta, as many as 127 men died in a single day, and during one three-month period, the total of dead exceeded the whole number of those on both sides who were killed at Gettysburg.

Author MacKinlay Kantor, who has converted the Civil War into a living as well as a passion (Long Remember, Arouse and Beware), has turned the grisly fact of Andersonville into a huge, massively researched novel (Book-of-the-Month Club choice for November) which will give Civil War fiction buffs their greatest hour since Gone With the Wind.

To Andersonville went perhaps 50,000 men. Its 20-odd acres were stripped of trees, and there was no shelter except the crude tents that could be fashioned from coats and blankets. Guards were ordered to shoot prisoners who strayed beyond a certain line. The sick died where they lay. Those prisoners who carried corpses for burial beyond the wall were considered lucky: it meant a little fresh air. After the war, the man who ran Andersonville, Captain Henry Wirz, was tried and executed for war crimes.

Under such conditions, the worst and the best in men were drawn out. Some formed gangs to kill and rob those too weak to resist. Others performed Christian acts that went well beyond the everyday call of charity. Outside the walls, not unlike concentration camp commanders of other centuries, Captain Wirz lived with his pleasant wife and nice children, spoke English with his heavy German accent, and to the end insisted that he was a good man who had done the best he could.

Around the horror of Andersonville, Author Kantor has fashioned scenes of plantation life, a commonplace romance, and compassionate confrontations in which the common decency of ordinary men in blue or grey is reaffirmed. He has also made much of the wartime trade enjoyed by the local prostitute. But his real hero is a man of good will who has lost three sons in the war, seen his wife go insane as a result--and can still be shocked by the cruelties piled on the enemy.

Andersonville is the kind of book that neither ordinary writing nor routine insights nor excessive length can hurt much.

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