The horrors of it all were starting to numb me. Chancellorsville, Spotsylvania, and the Wilderness ranked three, four, and six in the list of bloodiest Civil War battles; Fredericksburg rounded out the top ten. All told, the ten-mile-square territory we’d traversed that afternoon claimed 100,000 casualties. The writer Bob Schacochis called Civil War Virginia “the abattoir of the South.” At Bloody Angle, I felt as though we lay near the center of that slaughterhouse. Butchery on the scale that occurred around Spotsylvania was hard to grasp, even for those who committed it.
