Devils' Domain by Tim Champlin

There was a reason people called Andersonville Prison hell on earth. With more than thirty thousand Union soldiers held captive in the worst conditions possible, death and disease were daily visitors. If scurvy or starvation didn’t kill them, the guards would. Sergeant John Mulroy knows he’ll die if he doesn’t find some way to escape. Problem is, even if he does get out, his closest ally suffers bouts of madness and just may murder him anyway….

Devils' Domain: Far From the Eye of God        

                                         
What inspired me to write this book was the novel, ANDERSONVILLE, by MacKinlay Kantor, which won the Pulitzer Prize for literature in 1955. I didn’t read the book until the early 1980s, but was very moved by it. Shortly thereafter, I visited the Andersonville site in southwest Georgia that is nicely preserved by the U.S. Park Service. Even though the wooden stockade is long gone, it doesn’t take much imagination to visualize what it must have been like with several thousand prisoners crammed into this open-air pen in 1864—hot, humid, stinking of feces and rot. This area of Georgia is still somewhat off the beaten track and isolated, surrounded mostly by farms, heavy forests and lowland swamps. It’s only a few miles from Plains, Georgia, President Jimmy Carter’s hometown.

The side-by-side burials in long trenches near the former stockade are marked with individual soldiers’ names and ranks. The six raiders who were tried and hanged by the other prisoners are buried separate and apart from those who died of disease and starvation. Providence Spring, which burst forth from the hillside after a hard rainstorm in late summer of 1864, is still flowing. Its clean water saved many prisoners’ lives.

Webster City is a town of about 10,000 in north central Iowa, where MacKinlay Kantor was born and reared and where his mother ran the local newspaper. Coincidentally, it’s also where an aunt, uncle and cousins of mine lived. I visited them often when I was a kid during the 1940s and 50s, and had some grand adventures with my cousins. Kantor (1904—1977) was gone from the town by then, but I was aware of his reputation. I later learned that he died on my birthday in 1977, so perhaps I was meant to write the novel, DEVIL’S DOMAIN.

The first half of my book details the struggles and sufferings of my protagonist, Sergeant John Mulroy, as a Union prisoner in Andersonville. He escapes, is recaptured, and eventually escapes again. He is saved from being buried alive by the help of a teenaged sentry, who flees with Mulroy in order to avoid harsh treatment as an indentured servant.

I’ve lived in the south (Tennessee) for over fifty years now, and it was anguish for me to vividly imagine and write about the perils and hardships of these two as they run toward Alabama in an attempt to escape the territory of the Confederacy (the Devils’ Domain).

You’ll hold your breath and suffer along with them when they encounter both friends and enemies, when they save a young woman, then are besieged by a group of assassins who…but then, you’ll have to read about what happens next, and how events build to a smashing climax.

Here is a sample at the beginning of Chapter 7 when Mulroy plays dead in one last desperate attempt to escape:

“Mulroy never knew how uncomfortable it was to be dead. As the sun rose over the stockade and struck him fully in the face, he realized he’d placed himself facing the wrong way when he lay down between two dead bodies shortly before dawn. He’d tied his own big toes together and lay on his back, clad only in his filthy, ragged, and torn blue cavalry pants with the yellow strip down the legs.

“His bare torso began to itch in a dozen places, and he could feel bugs crawling under him on the sandy soil. As the sun rose higher, prisoners carried more and more bodies and laid them on the ground in rows near the gate. Mulroy wondered how long he would have to endure this before the dead wagon rolled inside to collect the cadavers. The hot July sun was causing him to sweat. Dead bodies did not perspire, yet he didn’t dare move to wipe it off for fear of being noticed by one of the guards on the wall.”

You’ll be glad you were born more than a century too late for this war.

You can purchase Devils' Domain at the following sites:

Dorchester Publishing

Smoke Creek Ranch Giftshop