The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers - Delia Falconer

All the other buffaloes hated Eddie, who was somehow in every photo at the party.

'He moves indirectly.' Rarely does a first sentence sum up a novel's method as aptly as this one, the opening line of Delia Falconer's second novel, The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers. Looming over this story, all the more powerful for being so fleetingly addressed, is one of the most infamous and hallowed episodes in American history: the Battle of Little Bighorn. Although Little Bighorn is the fulcrum on which the novel turns, it's the battle's preliminaries and aftermath that fascinate Falconer.

The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers takes as its subject Frederick Benteen, a captain who served under General George Custer at Little Bighorn. There Custer, against Benteen's advice, split his forces and 'dashed off chasing glory', eventually meeting a vast gathering of Sioux Indians. Hopelessly outnumbered, Custer ordered Benteen to provide assistance. Realising the folly of obeying, Benteen instead saved the men left under his command. Custer and his men were massacred, while Benteen was later commended for his coolness under fire. Cruelly, in the aftermath of Little Bighorn, it was Custer who became a popular hero, while Benteen became known as 'The man who let Custer die. Who was not half the soldier'.

Twenty-two years later, in 1898, an elderly and retired Benteen receives a letter from a young man eager to write a history of Little Bighorn: ‘It is my fervent wish', the young man writes, 'that I may argue your case against the malicious ghost of Custer and those who would claim him as a hero’. Time hasn't dimmed Benteen's sense of grievance; he reads these words and greets the young man as his 'avenger'.

While considering his reply to the letter, Benteen recalls his years serving in the Seventh Cavalry under Custer. Contrary to expectations, his recollections aren't a vindication, but rather a jumble of jokes, conversations, and sketches of the men with whom he served. He recalls the jottings of Stargazer. The scatological humour of Handsome Jack. The fantastic dreams of Pritzker. Stolid De Rudio, the bugler. Monroe. Sully. Scruggs. In fact, Benteen realises that what he most wants to write isn't a rebuttal of the role assigned to him by history, but a record of ‘the lost thoughts of soldiers’ because ‘this is history too...the weight of gathered thoughts, the cumulus of idle moments.'

This is Falconer’s ambition too — to write a novel that captures the evanescent moment, not an arid history that leaves the deeds and dates but sucks from them their marrow, their lived reality. For Benteen, and for Falconer, history is the sum of countless minutiae, such as Stargazer's entries in his journal or Handsome Jack finding a turd in his blanket roll. In this respect, The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers is wholly successful. Falconer slips seamlessly into an American idiom and conjures up a cast of characters that is authentic and enthralling.

None more so than Custer himself. Falconer's Custer is an extraordinary creation: uncouth, ambitious, and narcissistic — yet glamorously so. Unlike Benteen, vainglorious Custer covets the grand stage of history and the immortality it promises. He even aids and abets his own mythologising, bending himself into a shape amenable to hagiography. As Benteen puts it, Custer's catchcry 'On, you wolverines!' was shouted 'not to the troops, but to the biographers he could hear already licking at their chops'.

In her first novel, The Service of Clouds, Falconer lavished everyday things and actions with a revivifying poetry. Yet it was a poetry that palled, as it strived for a descriptive frisson in every paragraph, on every page. However, The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers, at a slim 140 pages, is better able to sustain Falconer's writerly style. What's more, the easy profanity of the soldiers matches the poetry with a bracing crudity, producing a happy commingling of opposites.

The Service of Clouds is an interesting point of comparison in other respects, too. Neither novel has a strong sense of story. Yet in The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers this appears to be a choice, not a flaw. Its short, desultory sections, sentence fragments, and occasionally clipped, list-like style are all in keeping with a novel that aspires to record the jaggedness of everyday life. And although the novel doesn't have a plot as such, Benteen's refined and introspective consciousness provides the unifying thread around which the novel is organised.

Some may bridle at the idea of a writer reaching across the gulfs of time, nationality and gender to write about one of the most storied battles in American history. Yet The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers confirms, if confirmation were needed, that great imagination, empathy, and art need not take heed of such jurisdictional niceties.

  -- Hans Fruck