Walk In Hell (The Great War, Book 2) [Hardcover]

Harry Turtledove (Author)

Book Description

Series: The Great War, Book 2 | Publication Date: August 3, 1999

A stunning epic of humanity at war with itself, Harry Turtledove's Great War saga plunges us deeper into the war that began in Europe, then exploded with a vengeance onto American soil.

The world is convulsing. Germany has smashed its enemies: Austria, Denmark, and France, while the United States and the Confederate States of America charge headlong into the global conflict--as bitter enemies once again.

The year is 1915, and the time of darkness has come. Though the Confederacy has defeated its northern enemy twice in fifty years, this time the United States has allied with Prussia. In the South, the freed slaves, fueled by Marxist rhetoric and the bitterness of a racist nation, take up the weapons of the Bolshevik rebellion. Despite these advantages, the United States remains pinned between Canada and the C.S.A., so the bloody conflict continues and grows. Both presidents--Theodore Roosevelt of the Union and staunch Confederate Woodrow Wilson--are stubbornly determined to lead their nations to victory, at any cost.

While land and sea battles are fought around the globe, new killing tools--poison gas, submarines, attack planes, and tanks--are pressed into service. Heroism and fear run hand in hand as ordinary men and women--families, friends, and lovers--choose desperate measures just to survive.

From the trenches that line the Canadian border to occupied Salt Lake City, The Great War: Walk in Hell takes us to the American front, then into prisoner-of-war camps, strategy meetings, and cities roiling with unrest. Once again, Harry Turtledove--"the leading author of alternate history" (USA Today)--has created a gripping, visionary portrait of how, if history had but taken another path, our world would have launched into a much bloodier War to End All Wars.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Harry Turtledove marches on through history with The Great War: Walk in Hell. In his alternate timeline, the Confederate States of America won the Civil War, aided by Britain and France. In the 1880s (How Few Remain), Americans fought again after the CSA acquired parts of Mexico--and the CSA won again. When WWI begins with Archduke Ferdinand's assassination in 1914 (The Great War: American Front), the 34-state USA under Teddy Roosevelt allies with Imperial Germany and Austria against Britain, France, Russia, Japan, Canada, and Woodrow Wilson's CSA. Trenches divide Canada, fierce fighting rages from Tennessee and Kentucky into Pennsylvania, a Mormon uprising against the USA consumes Utah, and a black socialist rebellion distracts the CSA, where slavery has ended but blacks still await full citizenship.

Walk in Hell takes us from fall, 1915, through 1916. Soldiers, sailors, and airmen continue the fight, but much happens behind the lines too. Turtledove's characters include Jewish immigrants who are socialist and antiwar, a widow running a coffee house in CSA-occupied Washington, D.C., who passes information to the USA, and two Canadian farmers living under U.S. occupation in Quebec and Manitoba. He vividly conveys the human side of war. When Joe Hammerschmitt gets a shoulder wound in the Virginia trenches:

... pain warred with exultation on his long, thin face. Exultation won. 'Got me a hometowner, looks like,' he said happily. Half the men up there with him made sympathetic noises; the other half looked frankly jealous. Hammerschmitt was going to be out of the firing line for weeks, maybe months, to come, and they still risked not just death but horrible mutilation every day.

Some find Turtledove's cast too large, the story's action too slow. Others complain that Walk in Hell is too similar to his Worldwar series. Alternate history buffs, however, will marvel at his mastery of detail, enjoy following his logic as he pursues military and social developments onward in time, and find it hard to wait for the next in the series. --Nona Vero

From Publishers Weekly

The Hugo Award-winning master of alternate world histories presents the second volume in the WWI series he began last year with The Great War: American Front. In Turtledove's version of the War to End All Wars, conflict rages on the American continent between the USA (with 34 states) and the Confederate States of America, which won secession during the Civil War. Allied with Germany and France, the USA in 1915 hopes to take advantage of a weakened CSA, which is plagued by a socialist revolution engineered by its former slaves. Setting his tale on a suitably large canvas, Turtledove introduces a variety of characters who exemplify the diverse political and economic circumstances of the period: Anne Colleton, a former Confederate landowner, must learn to cooperate with her activist fieldhands; Flora Hamburger, a New York intellectual, fights against class injustice and runs for a seat as a socialist congresswoman; Confederate sub commander Roger Kimball plans a risky attack on New York Harbor. Turtledove judiciously blends famous historical characters into the plot, so readers learn of General Custer's frustration at being unable to conquer Tennessee and see Woodrow Wilson as a Confederate president. Although there are numerous battle scenes, the gore is restrained. Instead, the author emphasizes character, and his thorough knowledge of the period's history will, as usual, captivate his readers, Foreign rights sold in the U.K. (Aug.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 484 pages
• Publisher: Del Rey; 1st edition (August 3, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0345405617
• ISBN-13: 978-0345405616
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.6 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (81 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #601,578 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Harry Turtledove is the award-winning author of the alternate-history works The Man with the Iron Heart; The Guns of the South; How Few Remain (winner of the Sidewise Award for Best Novel); the Worldwar saga: In the Balance, Tilting the Balance, Upsetting the Balance, and Striking the Balance; the Colonization books: Second Contact, Down to Earth, and Aftershocks; the Great War epics: American Front, Walk in Hell, and Breakthroughs; the American Empire novels: Blood & Iron, The Center Cannot Hold, and Victorious Opposition; and the Settling Accounts series: Return Engagement, Drive to the East, The Grapple, and In at the Death. Turtledove is married to fellow novelist Laura Frankos. They have three daughters: Alison, Rachel, and Rebecca.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Weak ending, great book, January 3, 2000

By 

Jason Erickson (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Walk In Hell (The Great War, Book 2) (Hardcover)

I can't say that the plot isn't progressing, but it seems the only reason for stopping where it did was that the book would be too thick and Dr. Turtledove had a deadline. American Front had the same problem, although we did have the dramatic Red Rebellion right at the end. Here we have more of a general shifting of fortunes. Nonetheless, if the next two books are as good as the first two, then the tetralogy will stand very well as a single story.

The thing I find most compelling about this series is the sympathy I have for the sympathetic characters on both sides while having so little sympathy for either side in the war as a whole. On the one side we have the CSA who still treat their blacks as chattel (although less and less as necessity dictates) and allied with our old WWI allies. On the other hand, we have the USA allied with the Axis powers and showing early signs of fascism, not to mention a growing Socialist movement in the absence of a powerful Republican party. How can this turn out well? Who do I want to win?

The answer is that it can't turn out well and the best thing would be for it to never have happened in the first place. Oh yeah, it didn't.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Turtledove's Dreadful World, October 30, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Walk In Hell (The Great War, Book 2) (Hardcover)

I agree with the readers who think that the United States and Germany will win the War. The US keeps its troops in North America instead of sending them to France to give the Western allies much-needed military and psychological support. Besides, the plot's progression points to a US-German win.

But no matter who we root for, it's hard to believe that the World will be a better place for either an American or a Confederate victory. Turtledove's World remains infinitely less attractive than ours, even if a victory for Kaiser Wilhelm prevents the rise of National-Socialism in Germany. The Great War series has nothing to offer but an arrogant and imperialistic Germany, crumpled land, burning towns, and lasting enmity between North and South, and between Canadians and Americans. Turtledove essentially applies a European scenario to North America, and shows exactly what our countries were able to avoid during the World conflicts.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Turtledove's best series keeps rolling along, June 3, 2000

By 

Stephen M. Bainbridge "www.professorbainbridg... (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Walk In Hell (The Great War, Book 2) (Hardcover)

Although Harry Turtledove is probably best known for his World War series, the Civil War series that began with HOW FEW REMAIN is doubtless his greatest work. The back-story for this series is a plausible world in which Lee's plans for the 1862 invasion of Pennsylvania did not fall into Union hands. After battles at New Cumberland and Camp Hill in which Lee crushed the Army of the Potomac, leaving Washington cut off, England and France intervene--forcing the North to sue for peace. In HOW FEW REMAIN, the story picked up in 1881 when the North declared war on the Confederacy following the latter's purchase of Chihuahua and Sonora from the Empire of Mexico. Following another British and French intervention, the Confederacy was again victorious. The Union is left embittered and hungry for revenge. At the end of HOW FEW REMAIN, Turtledove foreshadowed the GREAT WAR tetralogy with clear hints of an emerging alliance between the Union and Imperial Germany. In AMERICAN FRONT, the story picked up in 1914. World War I has broken out in Europe. The Union and Imperial Germany are staunch allies, while the Confederacy remains allied with England and France. In short order, the Union and the Confederacy plunge into a war paralleling that in Europe. The war doesn't make a lot of sense. In World War I, all of the European players had clear war aims. The war turned out to be a tragic folly, but they all knew why they went to war. In contrast, it's not clear why the Union and Confederacy are fighting (old animosities?) or what their respective war aims are. Does the USA believe it can conquer and reabsorb the Confederacy? Perhaps this is Turtledove's point-the utter folly of war. If so, his story powerfully illustrates the utility of George Washington's advice that the US steer clear of "entangling alliances" with European powers. As made even more clear in WALK IN HELL, privation and radical social change are the war's only sure outcome.

As usual with Turtledove, there are a lot of sub-plots to keep track of--at least a dozen! Crib notes are almost a necessity. Besides being hard to keep track of, some of the plot lines are duplicative. Consider the McGregor and Galtier sub-plots. Both are based around oppressed Canadian families living in territories occupied by US forces. (Even though Germany's experience in two world wars demonstrates that two-front wars are a bad idea, the Union happily jumped into one with the Confederacy to the south and Anglo-Canada to the north.) The chief difference between the two is that they illustrate distinct reactions to occupation...resistance by the McGregors and (slower to be unveiled) a slow fall into collaboration by the Galtiers. From a dramatic perspective, Turtledove would have done better to combine these separate plot lines into a single one, in which the conflict could have been established within a single family, heightening the tension.

One of the nice points in WALK IN HELL is the way Turtledove captures the complexity of life in war and the moral ambiguities was forces upon us. Consider, for example, the interesting Cincinnatus plot line-a black southerner in Union occupied Kentucky finds himself caught between self-preservation, working a day job for the Union, entanglement with a pro-Confederacy resistance movement, and the black socialist underground. Cincinnatus must sail between Scylla and Charybdis with no room for error. Although characterization generally is not one of Turtledove's strengths, the Cincinnatus sub-plot is an excellent treatment of the hard choices such a war would have forced upon ordinary people. (On the other hand, Cincinnatus has the misfortune of being subjected to one of Turtledove's embarrassing sex scenes.)

One thing worries me: In the Jake Featherston subplot Turtledove is doing some pretty blatant foreshadowing. Featherston is a front line Confederate soldier with increasingly strong racist attitudes towards blacks. So here's a prediction as to where Turtledove is going: after two more books in THE GREAT WAR series, the south will lose the war. Economic privation and social breakdown will follow. (Think Weimar Germany.) Then a former front line soldier will rise to power as a racist demagogic leader. Featherston will be the Confederacy's Hitler and the blacks will be the south's Jews. And we'll be buying yet another tetralogy-this time dealing with WWII.

Although I still think HOW FEW REMAIN is superior to the the GREAT WAR tetralogy (to date), the latter still is highly recommended.