Jim’s Reviews > The Civil War: A Narrative, Vol. 3: Red River to Appomattox > Status Update

'Which way, General?' his companion asked, and [General Nathan Bedford] Forrest replied glumly [this was after the surrender]. 'Either. If one road led to hell and the other to Mexico, I would be indifferent which to take.'

Old Peter [General James Longstreet] was quick to point out that the Articles of ar provided the death penalty for officers who urged capitulation on their commanders. As for himself, he said angrily, 'If General Le doesn't know when to surrender until I tell him, he will never know.'

Robt E Lee: 'Well, Colonel,' he said o one of his staff as he drew rein, 'it has happened as I told hem it would at Richmond, The line has been stretched until it has broken.'

Grant: 'Everything looks like dissolution in the South. A few more days of success with Sherman will put us where we can crow loud.'

'Ain't we in one hell of a fix?' one ragged Tennessean groaned as he picked himself up, slathered with mud from a fall on the slippery pike. 'Ain't we in one hell of a fix: a one-eyed President, a one-legged general, and a one-horse Confederacy!'

Grant, for one, disagreed with this assessment of the situation in North Georgia. Informed of [Jefferson] Davis's late-September prediction that the fate that crumpled Napoleon in Russia now awaited Sherman outside Atlanta, he thought it over briefly, then inquired: 'Who is to furnish the snow for this Moscow retreat?'

Grant told halleck to see it it that [Jubal Early] was pursued by 'verans, militiamen, men on horseback, and everything that can be got to follow,' with specific instructions to 'eat out Virginia clean and clear as far as they go, so that crows flying over it will have to carry their own provender with them.'

'Are you going to charge those works?' a cannoneer asked as a column of infantry passed his battery, headed for the front, and was told by a foot soldier: 'No, we are not going to charge. We are going to run toward the Confederate earthworks and then we are going to run back. We have had enough of assaulting earthworks.'

An officer on Meade's staff observed Hancock's troops slogging down to Wilcox Landing just before sunset, hot and tired from their thirty-mile overnight march, their faded, sweat-splotched uniforms in tatters from forty days of combat, and was struck by the thought that 'the more they serve, the less they look like soldiers and the more they resemble day laborers who have bought second-hand military clothes.'

Grant got up from the stump, took the cigar out of his mouth, and turned on this prophet of doom and idolator of his opponent, "Oh, I am tired of hearing what Lee is going to do,. Some of you seem to think he is going to turn a double somersault and land in our rear and on both flanks at the same time. Go back to your command and try to think what we are going to do ourselves, instead of what Lee is going to do."