ON his release from hospital after the World War Hervey Allen took a trip on foot and horseback through the Shenandoah Valley; sixteen years later, on his excursions through his native Pennsylvania and down the Valley, something began to stir the blood of a novelist who was once an infantry officer. Mr. Allen had resolved that his next book should be about the Civil War before Gone With the Wind ever appeared.
Action at Aquila (Farrar and Rinehart, $2.50) is a story of the autumn and winter of 1864. It is the story of Nat Franklin, the tall, amiable, burnsided Colonel of the 6th Pennsylvania Cavalry, Granted a furlough after three years of fighting, he spends some weeks behind the lines: visits his home town and is bored to distraction; visits Philadelphia and loses his temper; stays overnight with ex-President Buchanan, friend of his father’s; and then on his lovely new mare, Black Girl, rides through the harvest country, through the Pennsylvania Dutch towns where his regiment has been recruited, to arrive at last at Morgan Springs, the summer resort of his youth. All of this is rather aimless going, a series of faintly nostalgic pictures in the detail of Howard Pyle. You like the Colonel, and, as the panorama unfolds, you see the resourcefulness and determination that held the Union together.
But at Morgan Springs Colonel Franklin has a close shave with guerrillas, and from then on the holiday is over. He rejoins his command, who are guarding one of the gaps in the Valley; he drills them against a threatening raid from Early, and temporarily he befriends a family of Southern refugees. There is an enchanting lull of Indian summer in the Shenandoah. Then the attack comes.
All this is told in warmly human terms, with the fascinating minutiæ for which Mr. Allen has a collector’s passion. I feel myself that he overelaborates for dramatic effect ; that he makes an innkeeper like Mr. Duane too windy; that the Colonel would not burst into tears at the sight of marching recruits; that no Southern commander would be quite such a damfool as Major LaTouche. Were this tendency confined to farce, it would pass, but the trouble is that the emotion is equally overloaded. And that is too bad.
For beneath the humor and tenderness and descriptive power of this novel runs a strong current of emotion which catches up the reader again and again. I think of the swift striding vitality of Black Girl, the Indian summer at Coiners Retreat, the rough compassion of Dr. Hotlzmaier (a superb character); the ever-felt beauty of the Valley; the obliterating aftermath of the raid, and that extraordinary bit, Paul’s image of his mother’s slipper as he is dying. What a pity, then, that this current should occasionally leave us in shallows.
