Mixed (Historical) Fiction

THE BUFFALO SOLDIERS, by John Prebble (256 pp.; Harcourt, Brace; $3.95], takes the reader back to the Indian territory (later part of the state of Oklahoma) in 1868, when the bit was tight on both horse and recruit. The pay rate for cavalrymen was "thirteen dollars a month, less twelve and a half cents deduction for the Soldiers' Home," and the odds against a man's getting back from a patrol were a little better than those for eventually getting to the home. The particular buffalo soldiers of the title are an ill-horsed detachment of Negro volunteers, all former slaves and displaced since the Year of Jubilo when Mr. Lincoln set them free. Three, serving their second hitches, are semi-pro by their own, if not their lieutenant's, reckonings; the other seven include homeless kids, a mulatto misfit, an aged and ageless field hand with a whip-striped back. In the eyes of Lieut. Byrne --a D.P. himself, as the son of an evicted tenant farmer from County Galway-they are as motley as the loth Cavalry's moniker for the whole of Troop M: the Calico Troop.

Byrne is a man who commands strictly and by the book, a document he knows wearily and well after what seems a life-time-and-a-half as a professional sergeant in the regular U.S. Army. At 38. he holds his first commission in the 10th Cavalry* without pride. He maintains that he is color-blind--to black, red and white. But two fierce military actions teach him differently. A forced march through the badlands ends in heroics and madness, stewed rattlesnake and deep swallows of horses' blood. Finally, after many a deadly duel in the sun. comes a love feast among the minorities, which lifts this dryly authentic western onto a surprisingly high moral plain. English-born, Saskatchewan-raised Author Prebble richly deserves his new-won certificate as member of the Western Writers of America; his Indians have a minimum of wood about them and his soldiers a minimum of tin.

SEEK THE FAIR LAND, by Walter Mack-en (308 pp.; Macmlllan; $3.95), is a sort of western, too. although it is set in iyth century Ireland. A minority of English settlers were struggling with a cantankerous but unorganized mass of natives whose language, religion, law and customs were totally different from their own. This lively historical novel deals with the mid-century years when Oliver Cromwell, having beheaded King Charles I. marched into Ireland with his vengeful army to put a quietus to the Irish question.

Cromwell failed, says Author Macken, because of "little men" like Dominick MacMahon, who proved that the human back is stronger than the oppressor's whip. Surviving the siege of Drogheda--during which his wife is murdered and one child struck dumb--stubborn Dominick dodges his way through sacked and smoking Ireland accompanied by a saintly priest, helped by Irish guerrillas and making the customary hairbreadth escapes from gun and gallows. Author Macken brings such sweeping lyricism to this flight as to make it seem that plucky Dominick is battling his way the length of Siberia instead of the mere 100 miles from Drogheda to Galway Bay.

A playwright (Home Is the Hero) and actor as well as novelist. Author Macken, 43, lives by the shores of Lake Corrib in Galway and often makes his enchanted land come more alive than his desperate people. But--vaguely leaning on a real personage--he has created a fine, bloodcurdling villain in the Cromwellian lieutenant, Sir Charles Coote, a chap so dark-dyed and nasty that readers will cheer when he is knifed to death in the next-to-last chapter by an incensed Irishman.

*Until the Armed Forces' 1948 integration, a Negro outfit staffed almost entirely by white officers, part of the 2nd Cavalry Division (European theater) in World War II.

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