Certainly Washington’s eighteen months in command had brought bitter lessons: that war was rarely linear, preferring a path of fits and starts, ups and downs, triumphs and cataclysms; that only battle could reveal those with the necessary dark heart for killing, years of killing; that only those with the requisite stamina, aptitude, and luck would be able to see it through; and finally—the hardest of war’s hard truths—that for a new nation to live, young men must die, often alone, usually in pain, and sometimes to no obvious purpose. He, more than anyone, would be responsible for ordering
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