The memory of the words is refreshed by Thomas Keneally’s Confederates. Classified as a ‘novel’ on its quaint jacket depicting men dead and dying midst the flags and smoke of battle it is in fact a masterly literary tapestry of a piece of gory history – the American Civil War.

Obviously researching his subject to the very last bullet, Keneally displays his craftsmanship by the manner in which he blends the threads of fact with those of fiction. Significantly, American critics are as one in their praise of the result – no mean achievement by an Australian trespassing on what they regard as holy ground preserved for their own writers.

Keneally picks up his threads in 1861, more than a year after the start of the grim four-year struggle between the eleven northern states (The Union) and the thirteen southern states (The Rebs, or Confederates). He ties the final knot a few months later.

Although the conflict has been described as the first modern war because of its industrial mobilisation, casualties, tactics, and use of artillery, rockets, balloons, and submarines, Keneally predictably highlights people, their suffering, and the general horror. In the process he demolishes some of the images created by other writers and movies. Of Stonewall Jackson’s soldiers he writes:

There were hardly any of those mythical confederacy grey coats and most men lived in the homespun of their forefathers, in jackets stained to a butternut color with a dye made up of copperas and walnut hulls. The newspapers called it the war between the blue and the grey. Well, it was the war between the blue and the butternut.

Later, he sustains the theme:

The whole of Maryland was sown with the young in blue and butternut, and their seed was dead inside them.

In one skirmish created by Keneally, shells lob in the neighbourhood of a village school. By chance, one strikes the bell in its belfry to evoke a soldier’s on-the-spur-of-the-moment comment: ‘Goddamit! They’re musical bastards, they is’.

But, if words from a letter can be an anticipatory epitaph, the ‘bong’ of the bell was a premature death toll for some of those who heard it. One was Hans Strahl who happened to be in line with the mouth of one of the cannons when a charge of grapeshot went off in his chest. Keneally registers his death with bloody clarity:

As one ball of grape tore Hans’ head off, others burst it into fragments and hanks of his dark head were scattered wide. Both his arms were likewise torn away, ripped up and thrown wide. His entrails were scattered over the hillside, his left leg sundered into small lumps and his right thrown away to one side amongst Texans and strangers . . .

Taken out of context, this passage appears to reaffirm Keneally’s apparent habitual obsession with violent death. However, in that which follows he makes his point:

Hans felt nothing but a fearful shock bigger than the known world. It is likely that the fact of his death seemed a small thing besides the great tearing he suffered. Indeed, his mother would report seeing him around the farm for some years after that afternoon at Manassas and, being his mother, she could tell he was hanging around bewildered and in need of a simple explanation.

When Keneally was researching the Deep South of more than a hundred years ago he must have stumbled across the existence of some old beliefs and customs and been fascinated by them. Nothing else can account for the inclusion of a weird episode involving a young character identified as Ash Judd and Mrs Lesage, a red-haired ‘witch of women’s diseases’.

The whole business wasn’t unpleasant. and Mrs Lesage sang songs in tongues as weird as her sister’s. Then sometime, in that deep snowing night, she was done and they lay together, panting and sticky with warm blood and warm juice, and they slept deep, worn to a wire by the struggle to make him safe in the battles to come.

Come morning, the reader’s imagination is stretched to its utmost limits. Ash is given a shovel and urged to dig below thick layers of ice and snow, being warned by Mrs Lesage to exercise care lest he ‘bark’ any flesh. Her cautionary words were timely:

Beneath the layer of snow Ash found boughs of spruce in a heap. Mrs Lesage gestured him to pull them aside. When he’d done so he first saw the naked blue thighs of a woman beneath the branches, an old woman whose flesh hung on the bone, whose paps were dry and frozen to her ribs. Then he saw the naked old man, lying on his back, his eyes closed, no breath fluttering in him. The pair of them made an ancient ice-blue husband and wife, sleeping deep under mounded snow and cut boughs.

A half smile on the old man’s face puzzled Ash until he is assured:

Not dead, Ashabel. These are grand folk, these’re the manny and pappy of my dead love, Mr Lesage. You know how it is, Ash, in the wintertime. With four people in the house the food gets scarce by now, for folks like us. These last three winters Mr and Mrs Lesage sleeps out here. At the first decent fall they rill themselves up with applejack and I lays them down out here and cover ‘em decently. In the spring I drop ‘em in a warm tub and they jest shake themselves like an old dog and sit up joking.

Ash is promised that the old man will be sent to protect him in the summer slaughters to come and in fact or in Ash’s imagination, he does so.

And so Keneally continues populating his version of yet another war with strange characters with strange, almost biblical names, killing and being killed, spying, fornicating, starving, or dreaming of setting everything to music.

After a drunken coupling, she slashed his leg with a knife, drank his blood, spat a quantity into a mug and madly daubed his body with a mixture of his blood and her spit.