Killer Angels, The - Michael Shaara [148]
Maybe then I'll understand it.
The rain was much heavier now. He put on the stolen cavalry hat and blinked upward into the black sky. He thought: it was my privilege to be here today.
He thanked God for the honor. Then he went back to his men.
The light rain went on falling on the hills above Gettysburg, but it was only the overture to the great storm to come. Out of the black night it came at last, cold and wild and flooded with lightning. The true rain came in a monster wind, and the storm broke in blackness over the hills and the bloody valley; the sky opened along the ridge, and the vast water thundered down, drowning the fires, flooding the red creeks, washing the rocks and the grass and the white bones of the dead, cleansing the earth and soaking it thick and rich with water and wet again with clean cold rainwater, driving the blood deep into the earth, to grow it again with the roots toward Heaven.
It rained all that night. The next day was Saturday, the Fourth of July.
"Thus ended the great American Civil War, which must upon the -whole be considered the noblest and least avoidable of all the great mass conflicts of which till then there was record."
-Winston Churchill,
A History of the
English-Speaking Peoples
AFTERWORD.
ROBERT EDWARD LEE.
In August he asked to be relieved of command. Of the battle he says: No blame can be attached to the army for its failure to accomplish what was projected by me... I alone am to blame, in perhaps expecting too much of its prowess and valor... could I have foreseen that the attack on the last day would fail, I should certainly have tried some other course... but I do not know what better course I could have pursued.
His request is not accepted, although he cites his poor health, and he serves until the end of the war. He never again attempts a Napoleonic assault. When the war is over, he believes that the issue has been settled by combat, that God has passed judgment. He lays down arms, asks his men to do the same. His great prestige brings a peace, which might not otherwise have been possible.
He asks Congress for pardon; it is never given. Dies of heart disease in 1870, perhaps the most beloved General in the history of American war.
JAMES LONGSTREET.
That winter he requests relief from command, on the ground that he no longer believes the South can win the war. Lee prevails upon him to stay. He is wounded severely in the Wilderness, 1864, but returns to be Lee's most dependable soldier, his right hand until the end at Appomattox.
After the war he makes two great mistakes. First, he becomes a Republican, attempts to join with old comrade Grant in rebuilding the South. For this he is branded a turncoat, within two years of the end of the war is being referred to by Southern newspapers as "the most hated man in the South."
Second, as time passes and it becomes slowly apparent that the war was lost at Gettysburg, Longstreet gives as his opinion what he believes to be true: that the battle was lost by Robert E. Lee. This occurs long after Lee's death, when Lee has become the symbol of all that is fine and noble in the Southern cause.
The South does not forgive Longstreet the insult to Lee's name. At the great reunion, years later, of the Army of Northern Virginia, Longstreet is not even invited, but he comes anyway, stubborn to the end, walks down the aisle in his old gray uniform, stars of a general on his collar, and is received by an enormous ovation by the men, with tears and an embrace from Jefferson Davis.
His theories on defensive warfare are generations ahead of his time. The generals of Europe are still ordering massed assaults against fortified positions long years after his death, in 1904, at the age of eighty-three.
RICHARD EWELL.
Serves with courage until the end, but as a corps commander he is fated never to achieve distinction. Of the Battle of Gettysburg