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March 22 - April 1, 2020
It is Anglo-Saxon and Protestant. Though there are many men who cannot read or write, they all speak English.
It is a strange new kind of army, a polyglot mass of vastly dissimilar men, fighting for union. There are strange accents and strange religions and many who do not speak English at all.
the spy shivered, wondering, Why do there have to be men like that, men who enjoy another man’s dying?
The general and God was a nice parallel. They have your future in their hands and they have all power and know all.
He had grown up believing in America and the individual and it was a stronger faith than his faith in God. This was the land where no man had to bow. In this place at last a man could stand up free of the past,
This was the first place on earth where the man mattered more than the state.
The fact of slavery upon this incredibly beautiful new clean earth was appalling, but more even than that was the horror of old Europe, the curse of nobility, which the South was transplanting to new soil.
The Frenchman may fight for France, but the American fights for mankind, for freedom; for the people, not the land.
A man who has been shot at is a new realist, and what do you say to a realist when the war is a war of ideals?
“I’ve been ordered to take you men with me. I’ve been told that if you don’t come I can shoot you. Well, you know I won’t do that. Not Maine men. I won’t shoot any man who doesn’t want this fight. Maybe someone else will, but I won’t. So that’s that.” He paused again. There was nothing on their faces to lead him. “Here’s the situation. I’ve been ordered to take you along, and that’s what I’m going to do. Under guard if necessary. But you can have your rifles if you want them. The whole Reb army is up the road a ways waiting for us and this is no time for an argument like this. I tell you this:
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“Well, I don’t want to preach to you. You know who we are and what we’re doing here. But if you’re going to fight alongside us there’s a few things I want you to know.”
“This regiment was formed last fall, back in Maine. There were a thousand of us then. There’s not three hundred of us now.” He glanced up briefly. “But what is left is choice.”
“Some of us volunteered to fight for Union. Some came in mainly because we were bored at home and this looked like it might be fun. Some came because we were ashamed not
to. Many of us came … because it was the right thing to do. All of us have seen men die. Most of us never saw a black man back home. We think on that, too. But freedom … is not just a word.”
“This is a different kind of army. If you look at history you’ll see men fight for pay, or women, or some other kind of loot. They fight for land, or because a king makes them, or just because they like killing. But we’re here for something new. I don’t … this hasn’t happened much in the history of the world. We’re an army going out to set other men free.”
“This is free ground. All the way from here to the
Pacific Ocean. No man has to bow. No man born to royalty. Here we judge you by what you do, not by what your father was. Here you can be something. Here’s a place to build a home. It isn’t the land—there’s always more land. It’s the idea that we all have value, you and me, we’re worth something more than the dirt. I never saw dirt I’d die for, but I’m not asking you to come join us and fight for dirt. What we’re all fighting for, in the end, is each other.”
“Didn’t mean to preach. Sorry. But I thought … you should know who we are.”
He was no good with civilians. There was something about the mayors of towns that troubled him. They were too fat and they talked too much and they did not think twice of asking a man to die for them. Much of the east troubled Buford. A fat country. Too many people talked too much. The newspapers lied.
Buford. Soft citizens.
but though he was kind to young lieutenants he had learned a long time ago it was not wise to get to know them.
It wasn’t the dying. He had seen men die all his life, and death was the luck of the chance, the price you eventually paid. What was worse was the stupidity. The appalling sick stupidity that was so bad you thought sometimes you would go suddenly, violently, completely insane just having to watch it.
The day of the one-battle war is over, I think. It used to be that you went out to fight in the morning and by sundown the issue was decided and the king was dead and the war was usually over. But now …” He grunted, shaking his head. “Now it goes on and on. War has changed, Lewis. They all expect one smashing victory. Waterloo and all that. But I think that kind of war is over. We have trenches now. And it’s a different thing, you know, to ask a man to fight from a trench. Any man can charge briefly in the morning. But to ask a man to fight from a trench, day after day …”
Changing character of war
there was this truth about war: it taught you the men you could depend on.
“You must tell them, and make it plain, that what we are fighting for is our freedom from the rule of what is to us a foreign government. That’s all we want and that’s what this war is all about. We established this country in the first place with strong state governments just for that reason, to avoid a central tyranny—”
Southern justification
“Well, Jim Kemper kept needling our English friend about why they didn’t come and join in with us, it being in their interest and all, and the Englishman said that it was a very touchy subject, since most Englishmen figured the war was all about, ah, slavery, and then old Kemper got a bit outraged and had to explain to him how wrong he was, and Sorrel and some others joined in, but no harm done.”
Southern justification
Lee said, “I once swore to defend this ground.” He looked out across the misty grove. “No matter. No matter. We end the war as best we can.” He put his hand to his chest. “Napoleon once said, ‘The logical end to defensive warfare is surrender.’
Aware of oath breaking
I swore to defend. Now I invade.
Lee
Longstreet said, “You cannot lead from behind.”
He swung to Heth. “General, you may attack.” To Pender he said the same. He gave no further directions. The generals would know what to do now. With that word it was out of his hands. It had never really been in his hands at all. And yet his was the responsibility.
Commanders intent and responsibility of command.
“What a piece of work is man … in action how like an angel!” And the old man, grinning, had scratched his head and then said stiffly, “Well, boy, if he’s an angel, he’s sure a murderin’ angel.” And Chamberlain had gone on to school to make an oration on the subject: Man, the Killer Angel.
Two things an officer must do, to lead men. This from old Ames, who never cared about love: You must care for your men’s welfare. You must show physical courage.
Southern women like their men religious and a little mad. That’s why they fall in love with preachers.”
“Honor without intelligence is a disaster. Honor could lose the war.”
A man is in his spirit and he has that in full no matter what part of his body dies, or all of it.
But the point is they do it all exactly as we do in Europe. And the North does not. That’s what the war is really about. The North has those huge bloody cities and a thousand religions, and the only aristocracy is the aristocracy of wealth. The Northerner doesn’t give a damn for tradition, or breeding, or the Old Country. He hates the Old Country. Odd. You very rarely hear a Southerner refer to “the Old Country.” In that pained way a German does. Or an Italian. Well, of course, the South is the Old Country. They haven’t left Europe. They’ve merely transplanted it. And that’s what the war is
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English view of civil war
Seen in the flesh, the cause of the war was brutally clear.
No time to threaten a man. Not now. Men cannot be threatened into the kind of fight they will have to put up to win. They will have to be led.
No two things on earth are equal or have an equal chance, not a leaf nor a tree. There’s many a man worse than me, and some better, but I don’t think race or country matters a damn. What matters is justice. ’Tis why I’m here. I’ll be treated as I deserve, not as my father deserved.
“To be a good soldier you must love the army. But to be a good officer you must be willing to order the death of the thing you love. That is … a very hard thing to do. No other profession requires it. That is one reason why there are so very few good officers. Although there are many good men.”
The war was about slavery, all right. That was not why Longstreet fought but that was what the war was about, and there was no point in talking about it, never had been.
the commanding officer should know as much as possible about the logistics of the situation, the condition of the army down to the last detail.
In the presence of real tragedy you feel neither pain nor joy nor hatred, only a sense of enormous space and time suspended, the great doors open to black eternity, the rising across the terrible field of that last enormous, unanswerable question.
