Robert Hicks' first novel is based on the emotionally wrenching true story of Carrie McGavock, a Civil War-era woman who took pity on the thousands of Confederate soldiers left dead and maimed in a field in Franklin, Tenn., following one of the war's bloodiest battles on November 30, 1864.

Carrie tended to as many soldiers as she could when her plantation home, Carnton, became a temporary Confederate hospital after some 9,200 men were killed or gravely injured in a matter of mere hours.

Perhaps most astounding, however, was Carrie's response after the battle when she realized that a wealthy landowner planned to plow right through the hundreds of unclaimed bodies left in shallow graves at the battle site: Carrie had the bodies relocated, named and charted in a private graveyard on her property that became home for more than 1,500 fallen soldiers.

Known in her day as the Widow of the South, Carrie walked among the graves almost daily, tending to the grounds and mourning these forgotten men.

In The Widow of the South, Hicks writes a remarkable tale of the grim cruelties of war and the human grace that sometimes emerges to allow us to persevere. Hicks opens his novel with an image of Carrie and her lifelong companion, a former slave named Mariah, as they wander among the graves, taking stock and remembering. A young orphan boy scampers behind them, evidence of Carrie's post-war efforts to also continually house two to three orphans, offering them education and a home until they are old enough to move out on their own.

Mere pages later, however, Hicks flashes back to the morning of that horrid Franklin battle, as soldiers from both sides begin marching into town and the battle lines form. For Sgt. Zachariah Cashwell, a young soldier from Arkansas who shortly loses a leg in a heroic move and later falls in love with Carrie, the terrors of war are best overcome by sheer willpower:

"The thing I'm about to say, you might not understand unless you've been in war. But in those moments before the fight, if you were a smart man, you'd figure out a way to convince yourself that it didn't matter to you if you lived or died. . . . There wasn't any logic to who got killed and who didn't, and it was better not to care, and to let yourself be swept up in the rush of the men beside you, to drive forward into the smoke and fire with the knowledge that you had already beaten death. When you let yourself go like that, you could fight on and on."

The images of war throughout the novel are both startling and real, particularly as Hicks shifts narrative voices among individual characters and even a sense of the town as a whole. When Lt. Nathan Stiles describes the death of a young Confederate soldier, it is difficult to shrug the image aside lightly:

"I watched a little rebel boy, couldn't have been more than 12 years old, suffocate under the weight of the dead piled atop him. Suffocated. I had never considered the possibility. Only his head stuck through the pile, and I thought for a second that he was looking at me and trying to say something, only he didn't have the air to do it. He couldn't breathe, and God knows where he'd been shot. His jaws moved, and his eyes welled with tears. The last I saw of him he was closing his eyes just as another body landed on him covering him completely. It was as if a wave had crashed over him, and he'd been pulled out to sea."

In Hicks' masterful hands, not only are scenes of violence and even romance made fresh, but the author admirably manages to avoid making such moments shocking or titillating; instead they are real, tangible, and horribly human.

Hicks also never shies from the depth of Carrie's character. Her lifelong dedication to the fallen soldiers and eventually the orphans she houses is fueled by a grief that nearly consumed her when three of her young children died of diseases all too common to the latter 19th century. When we meet Carrie on the morning of the battle, she is barely 30 years old but sickly, dressed in full mourning attire, and presumably on the verge of mental collapse.

Astonishingly, the horrors of war that invade her once stately home somehow buoy Carrie's soul, giving her something to live for beyond the graves of her own children - a life's mission that surpasses even the grief of losing a child, accompanied by an enduring selflessness from which we all surely could glean something applicable to our own lives.

Jennie A. Camp's reviews and short stories have appeared in PrairieSchooner, Colorado Review and other publications. She lives in Platteville.