The Killer Angels (The Civil War Trilogy, #2)

by Michael Shaara

This was the first place on earth where the man mattered more than the state. True freedom had begun here and it would spread eventually over all the earth. But it had begun here.

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. They were forming a new aristocracy, a new breed of glittering men, and Chamberlain had come to crush

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?

He did not think much of the Cause. He was a professional: the Cause was Victory.

Tom hummed a few bars of what was still known as “Butterfield’s Lullaby” but which the army would later know as “Taps” and which now had no connotation of death, which simply meant rest for the night, rest after a long day in the dust and the sun, with the bugles blaring,

Chamberlain thought: would have thought mountain men were tougher than city boys. But mountain men get all the diseases. City boys get immune as they grow up. We were a thousand strong when we left Maine.

“Honor without intelligence is a disaster. Honor could lose the war.”

When Lee dug trenches around Richmond they called him, derisively, the King of Spades.

wouldn’t it be proper for the ammunition factories to stay open on Sunday? Most of the officers agreed that it had not yet come to that.

“I don’t really understand it. Never have. The more I think on it the more it horrifies me. How can they look in the eyes of a man and make a slave of him and then quote the Bible?

The point is that we have a country here where the past cannot keep a good man in chains, and that’s the nature of the war. It’s the aristocracy I’m after.

“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.

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.