Gods and Generals - Jeff Shaara [1]
JEFF SHAARA
INTRODUCTION
TWO EXTRAORDINARY events occur in the mid-1840S. First, the United States Military Academy, at West Point, in a stroke of marvelous coincidence, graduates several classes of outstanding cadets, a group of young men who at the time are clearly superior to many of the classes that have preceded them. The second event is the Mexican War, the first time the armed forces of the United States takes a fight outside its own boundaries. The two events are connected, and thus, together, they are more significant than if they had occurred separately, because the events in Mexico served almost immediately as a brutal training ground for these cadets, who are now young officers.
They are a new breed of fighting man, the college-educated professional soldier, and the Mexican War is the first war to which West Point has given commanders. It is not a popular war, is seen by many opponents as nothing more than a land grab, the opportunity for the United States government to flex its muscles over a weaker enemy, and thus gain the spoils: South Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California. What no one can know at the time is that the experience these young soldiers receive will have a profound effect on the battlefields of their own country in 1861. Not only do these men bring home the terrible visions of death and destruction, the experience that wars are not in fact great and glorious exhibitions, but they bring home something more—the discovery that the old way of fighting a war, the Napoleonic School, is becoming dangerously outdated.
The discovery comes from the use of the latest improvements in technology, for the rifleman and the cannoneer, for the observer and the bridge builder. Mexico is very much a testing ground for the new killing machines: greater range, accuracy, and firepower. And so, these young officers are schooled not only in the skills of traditional command and tactics, but in the vastly improving knowledge of the art itself, of engineering and mathematics.
The effect that all of this will have thirteen years later, on the battlefields of our own country, cannot be underestimated. One of the many great tragedies of the Civil War is that it is a bridge through time. The old clumsy ways of fighting, nearly unchanged for centuries, marching troops in long straight lines, advancing slowly into the massed fire of the enemy, will now collide with the new efficient ways of killing, better rifles, much better cannon; and so never before—and in American history, never since—does a war produce so much horrifying destruction.
But this is not a story about the army, or about war, but about four men. Three of them serve their country in Mexico, two of them spend the decade of the 1850s in a peacetime army with very little constructive work to do. They are not friends, they do not share the same backgrounds. But their stories tell the stories of many others, weaving together to shape the most tragic event in our nation’s history, and so their story is our story.
ROBERT EDWARD LEE
Born 1807, Lee graduates from West Point in 1829, second in his class, with the unequaled record of never having received a single demerit for conduct in his four years as a cadet. He returns home to Virginia to a dying mother and a scandal-laden family, and so resolves that his life shall bring atonement. Lee possesses an unwavering sense of dignity, and is thus often considered aloof, but his dedication to duty and his care for those around him reveal him to be a man of extraordinary compassion and conscience. His faith is unquestioning, and he believes that all of his accomplishments, all events around him, are the result of God’s will.
Lee marries Mary Anne Randolph Custis and has seven