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Scarecrow in Gray

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The title of Barry Yelton's Scarecrow in Gray is derived from the impression of the condition of the Confederate soldiers as described by a new recruit, Francis Yelton, the author's great-grandfather. The book is a personal, emotional tale of the new private's adventures during the final year of the Civil War, in which the men were all so starved they looked like scarecrows. Many plot elements have already been discussed in detail in other reviews, so I shall not repeat them again.

With the exception of many omitted commas and other minor editing details, Scarecrow in Gray is a very professionally composed and packaged product. The elegant cover and the blurbs on the back adequately reveal the context of the story contained inside. The past tense, matter-of-fact, monolog nature of the author's writing style could have displayed a bit more punch; however, there is absolutely nothing wrong with the plot itself. Barry takes the reader right into the muck of it all with a lead character who is as compassionate as he is dangerous to those who display less than scrupulous character traits. Sometimes the enemy is not wearing blue, and Mr. Yelton does a fine job of describing such situations.

The best thing I can say about Barry Yelton's poignant first novel of historical fiction is that he has brought the ghost of Bruce Catton back to life. Catton has always been heralded as the best storyteller of tales of The War Between the States, with a personalized compassion brimming from every book. His books may not have been the most factually correct history tomes, but they placed the reader right on the battlefield. Barry Yelton's first novel is much shorter, and with somewhat less description, than Catton's legendary books, but Scarecrow in Gray takes the reader into the human soul in much the same manner.

The first thing you realize as you read Barry Yelton's prose is that he is a skillful craftsman with a gift for lyrical description. I am not a big fan of books about war but this story is deeply moving because it is less the story of a war than it is the story of how an honorable and good man endures such a thing.

Francis Yelton is not the sort of man who should ever have to be a soldier. He is a farmer, a loving husband, a devoted father and a man of Faith. Yet he is in that terrible position of having to fight because, if he does not, how can he continue to be all of those other things he defines himself as? Yelton is an inherently good man, that is the thing that makes his position so difficult. He doesn't want to fight and he has no use for the sorts of atrocities and inhumanities that happen in war --- rape and murder and inconscionable behavior. But he holds fast to his personal dignity, sometimes in the face of terrible circumstances. Through battle after battle we see him travel farther and farther from his life as father/husband/farmer and yet he perseveres.

This book is more an homage to the nobility of a man in a very bad situation than anything else. Author Yelton, who wrote the book based on the life of an ancestor, has given literature a protrait of a decent, strong, and ultimately triumphant man. In this era of war that we live in, it is a powerful statement about what we ask of men who fight, and what it can do to them. A message we need to be reminded of again and again.

A North Carolina farmer goes off to fight a war in which he has no stake in this historical novel of the Civil War. It is the final months of a war reaching its inevitable conclusion, and most people know the Southern cause is already lost when Francis Yelton enlists against his better judgment. He is not a slave owner, nor has he any interest in the politics of the failing Confederate government. But the rebel army is desperate for men and if Francis does not volunteer, he will be conscripted. The author's elegant prose brings a poetic quality to this well-written novel. Francis, an ordinary but insightful man, sees the beauty of the land around him more clearly than most and recognizes the devastation of war as a grievous insult to the Earth and its Maker. He questions his reasons for being on the battlefield, comparing himself to a leaf floating in a river:

"The leaf doesn't have a say in where it's going. It just goes because a greater power takes it."

While Francis reluctantly shoulders his musket to shoot men just like himself, he worries about his home and his family, who must survive in a hostile world without him. Thanks to General Sherman's "scorched earth policy," Francis knows exactly what the enemy could do to his farm. But Southern deserters and outlaws pose just as great a threat. Scarecrow in Gray is a worthy read - the story of a war already lost and the men who knowingly served the losing side in defense of the land and the people they loved.

For several years, I've been interested in the Civil War, particularly with respect to western North Carolina. Having done a good deal of research of my own, I was particularly impressed with the way the author got into his hero's head and gave Francis a credible motive for enlisting in the Confederate Army. The descriptions of the privations endured by the soldiers were some of the most moving and realistic I've ever encountered. I got a little teary-eyed in a couple of spots, and I don't think of myself as particularly sentimental. Cadmus the rabbit was a nice touch, also.

Full disclosure: The author is my 3rd cousin twice removed, although we've never actually met. Having researched the Yelton family for years, I know that the economic and social milieu of Francis Yelton as described in the book is entirely accurate, as are the basic facts of his military career.

"Scarecrow In Gray" is how the Confederate soldiers described their appearance as they struggled while fighting the Union soldiers. The author has written a novel that opened my eyes dramatically as I read about the rag-tag appearance of these men as they attempted to learn how to fight in a war, how to march, how to retreat, and how to overcome the mental and physical damage they suffered while attempting to fight for a cause that they were not sure they completely agreed with.

Francis Yelton was a farmer in North Carolina. All he wanted to do was farm to keep his family alive with the meager income from the crops he grew and those crops his family needed for year round existence. Francis was not a warrior. He wanted nothing to do with fighting against other soldiers that lived in the same nation he did. After time the pressure from the recruiters made him give in and, despite not wanting to leave his wife and children, he took off for the area the recruiters told him to report for training. Along the way he met another area farmer, Whit Whitaker, and they traveled off together, both reluctant to go but Whit had been conscripted whereas Francis was a volunteer. Both regretted having to leave their farms before the crops were ready for market, each knowing that their wives and children would bear the work of finishing plowing and picking and the other extremely hard work that a farm required. They only hoped and prayed that the war would not last much longer.

After a long journey to get to the camp, they settled in to the harsh way of living, eating, and merely existing. Food was in such short supply that even in this training camp the meals were very meager and many food items were non-existent. They had to learn fast since the Confederacy was so short of soldiers. They were vastly outnumbered by the Union troops in numbers, food, weapons, and ammunition. Clothing was also short. Uniforms existed only when some could be found. Whit and Francis did indeed learn fast and took off towards the battle lines with their ragtag fellow men along side.

The battles were such that both sides suffered terribly but with the vast overpowering Union army, there were too few Confederates fighting the Yankee masses. Scarecrow In Gray is not for the faint at heart. The description of the battles, the holes that the round bullets placed in bodies or going through bodies, the loss of limbs torn off by a shell, the piercing of men by knives in hand-to-hand combat, and the turn and retreat if you can move, all combined to tell some of the horrible sufferings caused by this Civil War.

Then when those survivors, wounded physically and/or mentally did retreat, their camps became a human nightmare of limbs being sawed off, the screaming of the many in pain, and very little and, in most cases, no pain reliever and certainly no sedative other than occasional alcohol to help during the surgeries. Many could not take this and deserted. If they were caught they usually suffered death for desertion.

Barry Yelton has captured a period in our nations history that we can't be proud of. He tells it like it was as he describes the suffering of not only the soldiers on both sides, but of the terrible toil the war took on the families of all these brave soldiers. They never knew from one day to the next if their loved one would ever come home. The death and injury toll was beyond what we can ever imagine. The close contact between the combatants made the fighting even more intense.

In Scarecrow in Gray, Barry Yelton has artfully captured the harrowing battlefield experiences of a humble and unassuming Southern farmer who joined the Confederacy for no cause other than that of honoring his fellow man. Mr. Yelton paints a vivid picture of a simple man with a powerful spirit, caught up in a complex war that made ghosts of such men.

Francis Yelton is the humble farmer, a peaceable man with a virtuous heart. Francis is driven by love for his family to stay home from the war and to protect them through unusually perilous times. But he is also driven by his conscience to honor the sacrifices of those who gave up the security of home to fight for a higher ideal. While Francis may not fully share the ideals of "The Cause," he enlists to do his part, that the sacrifices of those who went before him should not have been in vain, and that his family should not bear the dishonor of his failure to serve.

My favorite books are those that transport the reader to the scene, and that effectively convey the experiences and emotions of the characters involved. In these things, the author has succeeded admirably. Mr. Yelton has made the horrors of war palpable, and the futility of that war real for us.

This book is simply an excellent readScarecrow in Gray

In the summer of 1864, just when even the most ardent Confederates were quietly agreeing that winning the Civil War was no longer an option, Frances Marion Yelton, a young North Carolina farmer, is conscripted into Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. This carefully-researched and beautifully structured novel reveals a Civil War, not of Generals and battlements, but of a muddy and exhausted Rebel private whose faiths are tested every day- faith in dignity and logic, faith in God, faith in his closest friends.
Barry Yelton has written a book filled with loyalty and hope spread on a dark canvas. There is also plenty of action and suspense. The final third of the book crackles with intrigue as Frances realizes that even though the Civil War officially ends, his personal war is still stalking him, waiting for him to drop his guard.

Francis Yelton didn't want to go to war, but in the waning months of the Civil War, the Confederacy, desperate for manpower, was conscripting those who wouldn't volunteer to fight a war that was already lost. Not wanting to be thought a coward or a shirker, Francis joins up against his better judgement and becomes a soldier in spite of himself. In this fictionalized depiction of a real person's service in the Army of Northern Virginia, Barry Yelton has done his great grandfather proud.

This first person narrative not only tells a memorable story of life in the last days of that doomed army, it illustrates well the fact that Francis, like most every other infantry soldier in the world, wasn't fighting for a cause - he never owned a slave and didn't know anybody who did - he was fighting for the guys in the trenches with him.

Well researched and well written, I recommend this book to anyone interested in the Civil War. The surrender at Appomattox Court House is particularly well done.

Francis Marion Yelton did not go off to war. The war reached into the distant mountains of North Carolina, carrying him away from his family and farm into the maelstrom of the last desperate months of the Civil War. The author, a descendant of Francis Yelton, a private in a Confederate regiment, has expanded on family lore to tell the story of a man who probably realized the war was lost even before he arrived in training camp. From the filth and tension of an Army camp to the terrors of Petersburg and the long hard road to Appomattox Courthouse, Barry Yelton recreates with measured prose the desperate battles of the closing months before the Confederate surrender in April 1865. In the midst of unspeakable horrors, he keeps his character tethered to a saner world by frequent references to the natural beauty around him: "The night it was a vast obsidian dome infused with sparkling points of light." But his beautiful prose is not at the expense of detailed and horrific descriptions of the battlefield where brave but outnumbered Confederates awaited the next Yankee onslaught. "Then we heard it, the low roar of the blue ocean, coming out of the woods, then the pounding of thousands of horses' hooves." Scarecrow in Gray is reminiscent of Cold Mountain and The Black Flower and is a compelling tale of one man's attempt to do his duty while preserving his humanity.

Barry Yelton has woven a masterful tale based on his Great-grandfather Francis Marion Yelton who served with the 18th North Carolina during the last year of the war.Mr. Yelton has done an outstanding job of bringing his character to life by using actual and fictionalized characters and by using local areas such as Rutheford County and Burke County, NC.I especially enjoyed the part of Camp Vance, considering I live about three miles from the site of the camp.
Francis is a reluctant soldier with a beautiful wife and two small daughters who enlists in the Confederate Army with a neighbor, Whit, in August 1864.These two men have a wide variety of adventures and meet and serve with some outstanding soldiers.I will not reveal anything more but I do highly recommend this book if you like details of battle and camp life.
I feel that this book should be in our middle school library and required reading for 8th grade NC History students.