The Richmond palladium and sun-telegram. [volume] (Richmond, Ind.) 1907-1939, 1912-12-12
BY ESTHER GRIFFIN WHITE.

Mary Johnston IN Cease Firing"
OHoughton-Mifflin Company, paints
on a big canvas.
With bold strokes which yet melt
off into tender nuances of delicious
color.
And it's panoramic view of the civil
war is as Illuminating to the tyro as
it's grim horrors are convincingly rem
iniscent to the experienced.
Mary Johnston first hove to with
''To Have and to Hold tale of more
or less elemental passions exploited
in the early Virginian days.
But the picture it drew of the time
was not so much its claim to consider
alton as the way in which it was
drawn.
This writer has a peculiar honeyed
style which "sickles DER" her virile
foundations like a tonal wash over a
dull canvas.
It's this that makes the reading of
her epic-like record of some of the
greatest battles of this frightful war
endurable.
Otherwise the microscopic detail
would weary and the realistic pictures
of the hell of war sicken.
Here is a really great book, great
in conception, great in execution.
And a book that should be ready by
the American young of the species.
For in it, as nowhere else, perhaps, is
the heroism and gallantry and patri-
otism of the Southerner so borne to
the consciousness.
The book is an astonishing exhibit
ton of erudition and painstaking re-
search and is admirable in its unpre-
JUDGED point of view although written
distinctly from the vantage of the res
ident Of the South.
Through it weaves the golden
thread of a romance as beautiful and
ideal as it seems unreal. Unreal be
cause of its honeyed film of words
thus:
The Southern spring was at hand
a mist of young leaf and bloom, a
sound of words, sapphire sky, a va
pour, a warmth, rhythm The sun
dipped behind the woods across the
river leaving air and water an exquis-
tie coral"
But, beyond everything else, the rea-
der gets the horror, the terror, the
beastliness and the folly of war. Over
and over the author rubs it in
It's all Internal. l have grown to
see no sense in this war. North and
South, we surely might have been
wiser
"Think!" said Cary. mo one ever
thinks in war. The soldier looks at
his enemy and then he looks at his
numbering piece, and then, instructive
ly, he seeks the best position-or what
seems to him the best position-from
which to fire it. And then he re-loads
and looks again at his enemy, and in
stinct does the job for him once more
and so on, ad fintum. But he never
thinks. If he did that, you know
there'd he no war"
Yet to them, too, it was fearfully an
every day matter. The time to vizua.
lie what will fall under the harrow
of war is before the harrow is set in
motion. Afterwards comes in Inevita
bleness with iron lips, and Fatalism
with unscrutinizing gaze, and Use
with filmed eyes, and Instinct with heI
cry
must keep ones senses!"
And so at last, from the general tc
the drummer-boy, from the civil ruler
to the woman scraping lint, no one
looks very closely at what falls be
meath the harrow. Madness lies that
way. And in war one must be very
sane"
Il should not have said that such
things could happen in a Christian
land" said Desiree.
"They happen" said the parsons
wife. War is a horror and horror tc
women. 1t has always been so and al
ways will be So
"A smile was on her lips-almost O.
derision. War is so stupid she said.
Here, too, is a significant saying
Dreadful as was this war, it had
as a by-product, the lessening of caste
Men came together and worked togeth
er as men, not as conventions"
And here Southern view of Gen
eral Grant
From higher ground and reache:
of the river far above Vicksburg
Grant, the cigar between his teeth
parallel lines showing across his fore
Yazoo again!-though it seemed
stream of ill-omen. Not that Gran
thought of omens. He was not super
stitious. A plain, straightforward, no