I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that Gone With the Wind is a long, long, long book. My first experience with the novel was a three-day-marathon during the hot summer of 1995, when the temperature in Chicago was over 100 degrees for what felt like an entire month and (what felt like) half the elderly population of the city died of heat stroke. Our window AC was no match for the humidity and I couldn't sleep anyway, so I was either going to spend my nights watching old Cary Grant movies on AMC or reading GWTW.
But every time I've read GWTW since then it has been something of a slog. I love the book a little more each time I read it, but nowadays I'm pretty busy and I have to limit my recreational reading to train platforms, buses, airplanes, and occasional lunch sessions. I started re-reading GWTW in January of this year, but I didn't finish until nearly April because it is a very, very long book.
But that's part of the reason why we love it so, I think. GWTW takes place over 12 long, hard years, and the reader ages along with Scarlett--even if you finish it during a single weekend like I did the first time I picked up the book. The movie is pretty good--and pretty long--but the cinematic version lacks the power and bite of the novel because it lacks the feeling of time passing. Hell, in the movie it seems as though Scarlett is only married to Frank Kennedy for about 10 minutes...
Anyway, Chapter 17 beings with more narration. It is May of 1864 and Sherman is now in Dalton, GA. MM tells us that the people of Atlanta had begun to think of the TN/GA border as being "a long way off," and I suppose it did seem quite a distance away for the people of Civil War-era Atlanta.
However, I made the drive from Chicago to Atlanta last year. I've drive through Georgia a million times, but I had never been to Chickamauga or Look Out Mountain before, so my sister and I got up early on our way back so we'd have a chance to check out the Northwest corner of Georgia. It might have seemed like the other side of the moon to the people of Atlanta, but last year we got up at dawn and made it from Augusta, GA to Chattanooga, TN before lunchtime.
So...yeah. It's not far at all. And once you get out of the mountains up near the border, there's nothing but flat land between Atlanta and TN. Well...flatland and Waffle House. Which is amazing.
Anyway, in Chapter 17 Aunt Pittypat is having a party and Cary Ashburn and the Meades come over for dinner. Rhett is there too, stirring up trouble as usual. The Meades and Captain Ashburn are trying to pretend the war isn't going badly for the Confederacy. Rhett is having none of it (of course), so he starts poking holes in their arguments and pointing out that the Confederacy is running out of men and weapons. Scarlett goes to the piano and starts playing a few tunes in order to soothe everybody's anger and make them forget about the war for a while, but the only things she can think of are sad war songs. Rhett comes over and suggests that she play "My Old Kentucky Home" and the two of them sing it together which is an incredible turn of events. Like, since when can Scarlett sing? And who would have guessed that the two of them could sing in harmony together at random like this? I suppose MM is using this to show that Scarlett and Rhett really are in sync with each other and attuned to each other somewhere deep down.
Anyhoo, here's a great link to Paul Robeson's version of My Old Kentucky Home. And now here's a link to good old Butterfly McQueen as Prissy doing My Old Kentucky Home in GWTW.
Now that MM has set up the pins--in this case Dr. Meade's assertions that the South with prevail and that the Yankees will never get into Atlanta--she knocks them down with exposition about the battles that occurred in Georgia during the late spring of 1864. Sherman is flanking Johnston at battle-after-battle, and Johnston is forced to withdraw "his thinning line a few miles farther."
And now the wounded start to flood into Atlanta. Scarlett and Melly and their female neighbors have been nurses for a while, but this is the first time they have to deal with fresh wounds, the first time they have to work on men who are severely wounded and unlikely to recover. Scarlett almost immediately gets "sick of the hospital, the foul smells, the lice, the aching unwashed bodies." She wants to go home to Tara--the second time she has threatened to go home to Tara in the recent chapters--but she's thwarted by the old ladies who run the hospital: they need every pair of hands available for work right there in Atlanta.
So Scarlett must stay in the ATL.
However, she still plays hooky and escapes up Peachtree Street, when Rhett Butler drives by in his carriage. She berates him into taking her for a ride, and he gets out and lifts her into the buggy (Drink! Rhett's carrying somebody in his arms again!). And Scarlett notices how:
"The muscles of his big body rippled against his well-tailored clothes, as he got in beside her, and, as always, the sense of his great physical power struck her like a blow."
Mmmmmmm hmmmmm.
Anyway, I'm a big fan of Ken Burns' Civil War series, and I particularly love the way he handles Sherman's 1864 Georgia campaign. But for my money, there's no more astute analysis of the situation than Rhett's in this chapter. Of General Johnston, Rhett informs Scarlett that:
"He'll have to keep falling back if he wants to protect the railroad; and mark my words, when they push him out of the mountains and onto the flatter land around here, he's going to be butchered."
Military strategy always seems complex in movies and in reenactments, but once you know something about battles and theory it's easy to see that Rhett is right. Wars might be fought over ideas and rights and taxes and representation and land grabs and slavery, but battles are usually much simpler. Normandy was about controlling the English Channel. Iwo Jima was about controlling an air strip. Vicksburg was about the Mississippi shipping lanes, and the Battle of Atlanta was all about the railroad. As a matter of fact, most of Sherman's March To The Sea was centered around destroying the South's railroads and tying them up. And anybody who says anything differently is pulling your leg. Don't listen to them! Listen to Rhett Butler!
No comments:
Post a Comment