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Review by George Cowmeadow Bauman
Any novel that features the Civil War and baseball will have a significant audience.
For the soldiers of the 14th Brooklyn, the war hasn't been all that different from deadly street games back home. Yet in the remaining days of their enlistment, a major battle looms before them.
When the 14th is on picket duty, by chance they confront an Alabama company in a beautiful, as-yet-unspoiled field near the fighting. Risking court-martial, the enemies choose to battle each other in baseball, the Rebels having quietly observed the Yanks playing catch. A best-of-five series over the next few days is agreed upon, with no one knowing how they'll be able to arrange such a dangerous diversion. Each "match" is furtive, lookouts posted against discovery by soldiers from either side. One private "considered yet another surprise of war -- why hadn't anyone told them that Rebs could play baseball?"
The reader doesn't have to be familiar with the actual May 1864 Battle of Spotsylvania to appreciate the horrors of in-your-face hand-to-hand combat. The description of trench warfare in a steady, two-day downpour in a hot Virginia July is saturating. The battlefield hospital scenes overwhelm the senses. Dyja successfully takes his late-twentieth-century readers back to times when giving, receiving and treating battle wounds was very personal, very nasty and, frequently, very mortal.
Soldiers under both flags, the few that have survived, are exhausted and demoralized.
The baseball matches designed to relieve the fighting tension become tense themselves, until freedom becomes the stakes they "play" for. Objections are voiced: "There was no reason to play a game with men who'd stripped the corpses of your dead friends and left them naked for the hogs." Trusting the enemy for nine innings is difficult, making the conclusion to this captivating book a conflict that plays out on the playing field and the battlefield.
George Cowmeadow Bauman is a baseball lifer, whose dream is to see the Pirates and Indians in the World Series.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.
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