Books: Washington at War

REVEILLE IN WASHINGTON — Margaret Leech— Harper ($3.50).

This book makes the U.S. Civil War real, tragic, fantastic and much more read able than World War II. Author Leech's (Mrs. Ralph Pulitzer) literary sector is the home front at the point where all its conflicts were most fiercely focused —Washington, D.C. Her purpose: to show the city and the nation that converged on it in 1860 to 1865.

She works in masses of racy and ironic detail, leaves almost nothing out, has no use for filters. By the open sewers of Swampoodle (an Irish slum), in bivouacs and bordellos as well as at Willard's bar and the President's receptions, Author Leech makes history's dead bones come to life.

Some will read this book for the Hogarthian gusto of its descriptions, humor, writing. Some will read it for the great familiar story of the war with its almost too literary climax of Lincoln's death at the moment of victory. Others, in the mood of another great struggle for U.S. survival, will read it for its swarming picture of a people's energies, creating out of next to nothing the greatest armies and armaments the world had seen, bursting into rowdyism, drinking, drabbing, killing, doggedly enduring continual defeat until the strength had been built up for ultimate victory, never quite overcoming, but somehow bypassing at last their own vast corruption, treason, bureaucracy, in efficiency, despair.

The Capital. Washington in 1860 was "an idea set in a wilderness." "As in 1800 and 1850, so in 1860," wrote Henry Adams, "the same rude colony was camped in the same forest, with the same unfinished Greek temples for workrooms, and sloughs for roads." The dome of the Capitol had been torn down for repairs; of hundreds of Corinthian columns, only three were in place. The rest lay scattered about the lawns among blocks of marble, lumber, iron, workmen's sheds, heaps of coal and wood. Augustly seated among the debris was the statue of George Washington, "modeled on the Roman conception of Jupiter Tonans . . . naked to the waist, with his limbs swathed in draperies."

In dry weather the ruts and holes in Pennsylvania Avenue were "iron traps, covered with thick dust." Rain turned the Avenue into a channel of mud. Flocks of geese waddled in it, "and hogs . . . roamed at large, making their muddy wallows on Capitol Hill and in Judiciary Square."

In this squalid town, which thousands of men in the next four years would die to gain or lose, there was a chill of fear in 1860, a feeling that democracy had reached the end of its rope. A revolution — secession — was under way. "It was unique among revolutions only in its impunity. Southern Senators and Representatives made no secret of their disloyalty."