"Chamberlin said nothing. He was thinking: How do you force a man to fight ---for freedom? The idiocy of it jarred him" "He thought: but the truth is much more than that. Truth is too personal Don't know if I can express it. He paused in the heat. Strange thing. You would die for it without further question, but you had a hard time talking about it." "In this place at last a man could stand up free of the past, free of tradition and blood ties and the curse of royalty and become what he wished to become. This was the first place on earth where the man mattered more than the state. True freedom had begun here and it would spread eventually over all the earth." "The Frenchman may fight for France, but the American fights for mankind, for freedom; for the people, not the land." "A man who has been shot at is a new realist, and what do you say to a realist when the war is a war of ideals?" "Some of us volunteered to fight for Union. Some came in mainly because we were bored at home and this looked like it might be fun. Some came because we were ashamed not to. Many of us came...because it was the right thing to do. All of us have seen men die. Most of us never saw a black man back home. We think on that, too. But freedom...is not just a word." "We're an army going out to set other men free." "He had a sudden rushing sensation of humyn frailty, death like a blowing wind: Jackson was gone, Stuart would go, like leaves from autumn trees. Matter of time." "A true gentleman has no vices but allows you your own." "Southern womyn like their men religious and a little mad. That's why the fall in love with preachers." "How can they look in the eyes of a man and make a slave of him and then quote the bible?" "Don't worry about ministers. The more you kill, the more you do the world a service." "To be a good soldier you must love the army, but to be a good officer you must be willing to order the death of the thing you love. This is... a very hard thing to do. No other profession requires it. That is one reason why there are so very few good officers." "You can hold nothing back when you attack. You must committ yourself totally. And yet, if they all die, a man must ask himself, will it have been worth it?" "Any minute now it would all begin. All hell would break loose and then no more worrying and fretting and fuming; he'd hit straight up that road with everything he had. Never been afraid of that. Never been afraid to lose it all if necessary. Longstreet knew himself. There was no fear there. the only fear was not of death, was not of the war, was of blind humyn frailty, of blind pround foolishness that could lose it all." "Tomorrow we will attack an enemy that outnumbers us, an enemy that outguns us, an enemy dug in on the high ground, and let me tell you, if we win that one it will not be because of the tactics or because we are great strategists or because there is anything even remotely intelligent about the war at all. It will be a bloody miracle, a bloody miracle." "He could not retreat now. It might be the clever thing to do, but cleverness did not win victories; the bright combinations rarely worked. You won because the men thought they would win, attacked with courage, attacked with fath, and it was the faith more than anything else you had to protect; that was one thing that was in your hands, and so you could not ask them to elave the field to the enemy. "You could not show affection here, no place for it here, too many men will die, must think clearly but all the while he felt an icy despair, a cold dead place like dead skin."
