"War!" R&B singer Edwin Starr shouted out in his 1970 chart topper of the same name, "What is it good for!?!" His answer, emphatic and fervent, found great favor with the anti-Vietnam conflict protesters of the day: "Absolutely nothing!"

But, of course, war is still with us and it seems unlikely to disappear from the human landscape anytime soon.

In The March, E.L. Doctorow's new novel about Civil War Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's famous March to the Sea that cut a swath of fire and destruction from Atlanta to Savannah and then north through the Carolinas, several, at best provisional and conditional, answers to what and who war is good for - are proffered. Not surprisingly, answering these questions also requires a look at what and who war is bad for, as well.

First though, some background on the circumstances of the last year of the Civil War: The Union was winning. In hindsight, no surprise there. But at the time, the South did not know the war was over, even after the Burning of Atlanta, a kind of 19th century example of "shock and awe." Confederate Gens. Robert E. Lee and Joseph E. Johnston, though without hope of winning, believed that they could wage an indefinite war of attrition, a guerilla war that would sap the energies, resources and patience of the North, providing, perhaps, enough time for a political settlement to the conflict that would allow the South to maintain some kind of separate identity from the Union.

It was Sherman's intention, with Grant's blessing, to disabuse the South of this notion and to break the South's will to fight on. The method he devised to carry this out has became known as Total War: The destruction of not just military forces and resources but of the civilian population and their goods and properties as well. Sherman is famously said to have noted that "War is hell." Few men have ever done as much to make this statement literal fact.

The March is Doctorow's re-creation of what it must have been like to live through those tumultuous first few months in 1864 that led to the South's final surrender in April of that year. To this end, he assembles a crowded, ethnically and socially diverse cast of both fictional characters and actual historical figures, and shuttles them about in an extraordinarily complicated, one might say even baroque and Dickensian, plot that is fueled as much by coincident and happenstance as it is by necessity.

Consider the varying fortunes of Pearl, a 15-year-old slave on the John and Mattie Jameson plantation freed in the first pages of the book by the Union Army through the agency of Lt. Clarke and his company of foragers.

Clarke is drawn to Pearl from his first glimpse of her when he enters the deserted plantation house: "he was stunned to find a child - a girl, bare legged - standing in front of a mirror and wrapping around her shoulders a beautiful red shawl with threads of gold as calmly as if the house weren't being destroyed under her." As Pearl flees the house, Clarke sees that she is "a white Negro, white like white chocolate."

Lt. Clarke takes Pearl with him when he and his men leave the plundered plantation, and soon has her wearing a Union drummer boy's uniform to keep her close to him. (This act of disguise is a running motif throughout the book as various characters switch from side to side between the Union and Confederate Armies, taking on and shedding identities as the disorder and confusion of war strips away the stabilities of cultural and social existence.)

Clarke, and most of his men, are soon dead but Pearl is immediately taken up by Gen. Sherman - who apparently doesn't tumble to the fact that Pearl, still in her drummer boy uniform, is a girl, though the rest of the men under his command quickly do.

Unable to maintain the drummer boy disguise after the onset of her "monthlies," Pearl takes up next assisting a Union Army physician, Col. Wrede Sartorius, a brilliant, if cold and distant, field surgeon who finds the carnage of battle a challenge and an opportunity: "If there was any compensation for the barbarity of war, it was an enriched practice. The plethora of casualties accelerated the rate of learning. Apparently he was alone in considering American Civil War a practicum."

Arriving in Savannah with Col. Sartorius's medical unit, Pearl next runs into her old masters from the plantation. The man, John Jameson, is dying from a head injury after getting in a fight with a Union soldier. John Jameson, of course, not only owned Pearl and Pearl's mother, he is Pearl's father as well.

The intricacies of guilt, defiance, evasion and compensation here are dark and grim. Pearl sits by the comatose dying man and whispers to him her contempt: "And if you worryin' about me I can promise no man will ever treat me like you did my mama, no sir. So you needn't worry 'bout your Pearl . . . She will take your name to glory . . . Make it nice and clean again for peoples to remember."

During all this, Pearl is constantly brushing up against or actually becoming entangled in a number of other plot threads, the most notable of which are: the adventures of two Confederate soldiers, Arly and Will, who constantly get in and out of Blue and Gray uniforms depending on which army they think will provide them with the best chance of staying alive; the ill-fated love affair between a Southern spinster, Emily Thompson, and Col. Sartorius, and, after that flame dies out, Emily's attachment to a young Union soldier, who in turn is infatuated with Pearl; and, finally, any number of military adventurers best represented by Union officer Kil Kilpatrick, a dwarfish, hunchbacked campaigner of great energy and appetite who rampages and loots with abandon and ends up being ambushed while in bed with one of his many mistresses. His pluck, and his luck, are such that he gets out of bed and leads a "successful counterattack in his underwear."

This grand churn and boil of a plot is in fact an image of war itself. Everywhere is hurly-burly, roar and chaos, sheer propulsive motion.

The very first sentence, in fact, plunges the reader, in media res, into the hyperbole that is war in motion. Consider this amazing tour de force, a 168-word sentence, in its entirety:

"At five in the morning someone banging on the door and shouting, her husband, John, leaping out of bed, grabbing his rifle, and Roscoe at the same time roused from the backhouse, his bare feet pounding: Mattie hurriedly pulled on her robe, her mind prepared for the alarm of war, but the heart stricken that it would finally have come, and down the stairs she flew to see through the open door in the lamplight, at the steps of the portico, the two horses, steam rising from their flanks, their heads lifting, their eyes wild, the driver a young darkie with rounded shoulders, showing stolid patience even in this, and the woman standing in her carriage no one but her aunt Letitia Pettibone of McDonough, her elderly face drawn in anguish, her hair a straggled mess, this woman of such fine grooming, this dowager who practically ruled the season in Atlanta standing up in the equipage like some hag of doom, which indeed she would prove to be."

This is war at bedrock level: panic, fear and confusion. Pettibone, aging Southern belle, arrives at her nephew's plantation with news of the inevitable: Sherman's Army approaches, havoc before him, ruin behind. In the complex and devastating calculus of war, the status of "noncombatant" is no longer a guarantee of safety.

The Union army's advance brings loss and desolation to these civilians: An elderly Southern judge feels that "The wretched war had destroyed not only their country but all their presumptions of human self-regard."

What's interesting here is that Sherman sees the same war, but from a wholly different perspective: "I have marched an army intact for four hundred miles. I have gutted Johnny Reb's railroads. I have burned his cities, his forges, his armories, his machine shops, his cotton gins. I have eaten out his crops, I have consumed his livestock and appropriated ten thousand of his horses and mules. He is left ravaged and destitute, and even if not another battle is fought his forces must wither and die of attrition . . . I am sworn to destroy the treasonous insurrections and preserve the Union. That is all. And that is everything."

Could one ask for greater meaning, for a more important, vital sense of mission and purpose?

Yet even Sherman, at least in Doctorow's telling, sees, by novel's end, that "victory was a shadowed, ambiguous thing."

And this is because the cessation of conflict, the end of the fighting, does not mean that the war, the real war, is concluded. Growing weary of the negotiations on the terms of surrender, Sherman notes that ". . .the war had come down to words . . . Language is war by other means."

It is to the credit of this fine book, that Doctorow's words, his language, bring to life the terrible consequences of what happens when words fail and the fighting begins.

Duane Davis is a freelance writer living in Littleton.

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