Episode at Fort Pillow

THE FALLING HILLS by Perry Lentz. 468 pages. Scribner. $6.95.

At sunrise on an April morning in 1864, General Nathan Bedford Forrest and 1,200 Confederate forces attacked the Union works at Fort Pillow in West Tennessee. Within hours the Rebs had butchered most of the ill-prepared garrison soldiers.

Fort Pillow had little or no military value. Manned by former Negro slaves pressed into Union blue and by stringy white Tennessee hillmen whom the Rebels considered traitors to the Southern cause, it was a special insult to Confederate pride. Thus it was almost fatally marked out for a particular brutality. Forrest's men were themselves a motley lot by parade-ground standards: reluctant conscriptees, looting Texans, Mississippi red-hots.

Although it seems incredible that a single square foot of Civil War battleground has remained unchronicled or unfictionalized, American writers long ignored this episode, perhaps because it reflected glory on neither Union nor Confederate colors (there was to be a congressional investigation of the scandalously inept, beer-blurred defense of Fort Pillow by its federal troopers). Now the story has been told in a first novel of remarkable merit.

Lunatic Moment. Precocious Perry Carlton Lentz, born in Alabama 79 years after the massacre, started writing The Falling Hills as an honors project for a B.A. degree at Kenyon College in Ohio. He mined the eyewitness reports of Fort Pillow survivors as preserved in the National Archives. Now a doddering 24, and an old soldier of the campus (he is taking his Ph.D. in English at Vanderbilt University, Nashville), Lentz has published a book with none of the sweet-magnolia swash and polished ballroom buckle of Gone With the Wind but much of the visceral realism that characterized MacKinlay Kantor's Andersonville.

Half a dozen or so central characters, wearing both the blue and the grey, move forward to the conflict. On the Confederate side, the standouts are General Forrest, a bombastic, semiliterate slave trader who leads a ferocious cavalry charge, and Captain Hamilton LeRoy Acox, a mild Georgian who, though weary of war, wields a mighty sword in a lunatic moment at Fort Pillow.

The Union side is perhaps more unattractively vivid. Fort Pillow's second-ranking officer is Major Will Bradford, who before the war was a Northern sympathizer in plantation climes. A sleazy, ambitious, jake-leg lawyer, he had run unsuccessfully for the state legislature and vainly courted Good Old Southern Family belles. With secession, he joined the Union army. Knowing clearly enough that no matter who wins the war he will be forced to leave his homeland hills in the end, Bradford lives "in a dry bitterness."

Rude Indignities. Second Lieut. Jonathan Endicott Seabury, a Bostonian idealist and Ivy League mama's boy still wet behind the diploma, is another of Fort Pillow's defenders. He "asked specifically for a colored regiment," dreaming of how he could teach Negro troops "English or history or geography" and monitor the happy spirituals that he fancied they would sing around their fires. He is ill prepared for the reality he encounters: dirty, sly, half-slaves whom he must train to fire fieldpieces without live ammunition. Thus he hides the gradual erosion of his soul by secretly rehearsing the noble death he plans to die in defense of Fort Pillow--protecting his cowed troops, daring the Rebels to kill him, instructing them to let his poor charges live. In the end, Seabury is amazed by the uncomplaining way in which his men die, and finds more irony and fury in himself than he had reason to suspect.

Some readers will be offended by the highly explicit manner in which Author Lentz describes the rude indignities heaped on the ignorant Negro troops by their white superiors, or the meanness shown by Confederate recruiters as they drag 16-year-old boys away from their homes to fight and die. There is reason to believe, however, that Lentz tells it the way it was.

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