But for me, doing the research was inspiring, as I saw people struggling with such difficult circumstances and inventing ways to be human amid a context of inhumanity. Even within the impossible world that Civil War battles involved, you could do things to retain the important values that defined you as something more than simply an animal. Soldiers will say, “We can’t throw these comrades in the ground like chickens. We need to do more than that.” Seeing the human spirit triumph even under those kinds of conditions was very moving for me.
