Shiloh Quotes

“But it seemed so wrong, so scandalous, somehow so unreligious for a dead man to have to keep on fighting - or running, anyhow - that it made me sick at my stomach. I didn't want to have any more to do with the war if this was the way it was going to be”
― Shelby Foote, Shiloh

“for men who a short time before had been shooting at him and doing all in their power to wreck his cause, I remembered what my father had said about the South bearing within itself the seeds of defeat, the Confederacy being conceived already moribund. We were sick from an old malady, he said: incurable romanticism and misplaced chivalry, too much Walter Scott and Dumas read too seriously. We were in love with the past, he said; in love with death.”
― Shelby Foote, Shiloh

“They nodded their heads with quick flicky motions, like birds, and nursed their rifles, keeping them out of the dirt. I had gotten to know them all in a month and a few of them were even from the same end of the county I was, but now it was like I was seeing them for the first time, different. All the put-on had gone out of their faces—they were left with what God gave them at the beginning.”
― Shelby Foote, Shiloh

“It wasn't a question of luck, the way some folks will tell you; they will tell you it's back luck to be near the wounded. It was just that we didn't want to be close to them any longer than it took to run past, the way you wouldn't want to be near someone who had something catching, like smallpox”
― Shelby Foote, Shiloh

“When I stopped I begun to hear all sorts of things I hadnt heard while I was running. It was like being born again, coming into a new world. There was a great crash and clatter of firing, and over all this I could hear them all around me, screaming and yelping like on a foxhunt except there was something crazy mixed up in it too, like horses trapped in a burning barn. I thought theyd all gone crazy—they looked it, for a fact. Their faces were split wide open with screaming, mouths twisted every which way, and this wild lunatic yelping coming out. It wasnt like they were yelling with their mouths: it was more like the yelling was something pent up inside them and they were opening their mouths to let it out. That was the first time I really knew how scared I was.”
― Shelby Foote, Shiloh

“That was when General Johnston rode up. He came right past where I was standing, a fine big man on a bay stallion. He had on a broad-brim hat and a cape and thigh boots with gold spurs that twinkled like sparks of fire. I watched him ride by, his mustache flaring out from his mouth and his eyes set deep under his forehead. He was certainly the handsomest man I ever saw, bar none; he made the other officers on his staff look small.”
― Shelby Foote, Shiloh

“I could see their faces then, and the army became what it really was: forty thousand men—they were young men mostly, lots of them even younger than myself, and I was nineteen just two weeks before—out on their first march in the crazy weather of early April, going from Mississippi into Tennessee where the Union army was camped between two creeks with its back to a river, inviting destruction.”
― Shelby Foote, Shiloh

“They will tell you Shiloh was no cavalry battle; the field was too cut-up with ravines and choked with timber for the usual mounted work. However, none of Forrest's men realized this at the time and we had our moments”
― Shelby Foote, Shiloh

“It was a strange thing to be in a distant land, among things you'd never seen before, all because our people in Congress had squabbled among themselves and failed to get along and there were hotheads in the South who thought more of their Negroes and their pride than they did of their country”
― Shelby Foote, Shiloh

“On paper, in the colonel's lamp-lit office, when we saw a problem it was easy to fix; all we had to do was direct that corps commanders regulate their columns so as not to delay each other, halting until crossroads were clear, keeping their riles well closed, and so forth. It didn't work that way on the ground, which was neither flat nor clean - nor, as it turned out, dry”
― Shelby Foote, Shiloh

“We were green; most of us had never left home before (officers as well as men, except the officers carried their greenness better) yet here we were, traveling south up an enemy river past slow creeks and bayous and brooding trees. I thought to myself if this was the country the Rebels wanted to take out of the Union, we ought to say thank you, good riddance”
― Shelby Foote, Shiloh

“Books about war were written to be read by God Almighty, because no one but God ever saw it that way.”
― Shelby Foote, Shiloh

“When General Johnston had heard them out, he drew himself up in the saddle, leather creaking, and said quietly: “Gentlemen, we shall attack at daylight tomorrow.”
― Shelby Foote, Shiloh

“There is no chance for surprise,” he said, shaking his head and shrugging his shoulders with that French way he had. “Theyll be intrenched to the eyes.”
― Shelby Foote, Shiloh

“This was mainly a brown country, cluttered with dead leaves from the year before, but the oaks had tasseled and the redbud limbs were like flames in the wind. Fruit trees in cabin yards, peach and pear and occasional quince, were sheathed with bloom, white and pink, twinkling against broken fields and random cuts of new grass washed clean by the rain.”
― Shelby Foote, Shiloh

“You easy-living boys had better get set, they said. There's johnnies out there thicker than fleas on a billy goat in a barnlot”
― Shelby Foote, Shiloh

“But they were all thinking the selfsame thing: I might be a disgrace to my country. I might be a coward, even. But I'm not up there in those woods getting shot at”
― Shelby Foote, Shiloh

“With such incentives to brave deeds, and with the trust that God is with us, your generals will lead you confidently to the combat - assured of success. ________ General commanding”
― Shelby Foote, Shiloh