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 Johnny Comes Marching
Home, Hurrah!
The Great War: Breakthroughs
Harry Turtledove
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The cheerful "isn't-it-great-to-be-a-soldier"
song, "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" derives from an older and rather
darker tradition, songs with titles like "Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye" and "My
Son John" -- bitter songs about young men who came home maimed. But it's
the cheerful, cleaned-up versions like "...Marching Home" that those whose
interests wars advance want us to remember because, if too many remember
"Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye", the next war will be harder to start, or, at
least, as Kate remarks, harder to man.
As Turtledove brings his alternate World War One to a close, we can already
see the seeds of the next war being sown, both in the specific activities
of characters in this book and by parallels to the real history of the world.
The treaties forced on the defeated Confederacy, intended to keep the CSA
down and make sure it's bever again a threat and, as well, to humiliate it
in return for all those years of humiliation that the USA has suffered will
certainly bear the same bitter fruit that similar humiliating and devastating
terms forced upon Germany bore.
Certainly the Red devils (metaphorically) of revolution and politics released
during the war will not easily be exprcised so long as the lot of the Black
man is not materially improved, and (as another reviewer has pointed out)
the embittered artillery Sergeant who has already begun keeping a journal
chronicling his struggles and his thoughts on what is wrong with the System
will very likely be Important in what is to come...
Structurally, this book is pretty much the same as most of Turtledove's alternate
history war novels -- the "Worldwar" books and the earlier ones in this series
-- being recounted in a series of segments telling the actions and experiences
of the members of a large cast of established characters (some entirely
fictional, some alternates of real figures in history) whose viewpoints cover
virtually all of the actions of the War and of the effects on those civilians
who actually encounter its results {sort of like what John Brunner referred
to as "Tracking With Closeups" in "Stand on Zanzibar"). The segments vary
from quite short vignettes to near-short-story lengths and are not -- in
my opinion -- necessarily all equally necessary to advance the story; there
is a redundancy here and there that i could have done without.
Another problem with the narrative technique that Turtledove has chosen,
in my opinion, is that it tends to make it difficult to see the characters
as people rather than as labelled cardboard figures. Thus, one is less likely
to be less interested in their problems and their fates than one is in the
overall sweep of the narrative. (Though, to be fair, that might be to some
extent the author's intent.)
A problem specific to this book is that, having moved his main character
from the Birmingham Alabama area into battle, Turtledove doesn't go back
there as much as he had been, and so we aren't seeing what conditions are
evolvong there as more and more blacks are working in the mills and foundries,
doing white man's work and drawing almost a white man's pay. Now that the
whites are coming home, are those blacks going to go peacefully back to where
they were before the War?
A sustaining enough read, but, as in the Real World, it's just a place to
mark time for a while, since the end of the "War To End War" merely sets
the stage for the Next World War.
Here's a frightening thought, given that in Turtledove's universe WW2 will
be, to a major extent, fought between the CSA and the USA on the North American
continent -- what if someone develops the atomic bomb? |
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