War, like the sea is slow to give up its dead; any verdict on a novel of war so immediately overwhelming as Thomas Keneally's ['Confederates'] should similarly be the slow fruit of rumination.

Since there is no such breathing space for the reviewer, one is tempted to risk the opinion that this author has excelled the achievement of his 'Gossip from the Forest' and 'Season in Purgatory' and that 'Confederates' deserves some comparison with the two great war novels of the last hundred years in the language, 'The Red Badge of Courage' and 'Her Privates We,' one of which stemmed from the bloody springs of experience and one from an imagination of genius.

It is stock-in-trade nowadays that the poetry of war is in the pity, but compassion at the finger tips is another matter from Keneally's compassion of the heart. The setting is the American Civil...