>They both bore it as though in deliberate flagellant exaltation of physical misery transmogrified into the spirits' travail of the two young men during that time fifty years ago, or forty-eight rather, then forty-seven and then forty-six, since it was '64 and then '65 and the starved and ragged remnant of an army having retreated across Alabama and Georgia and into Carolina, swept onward not by a victorious army behind it but rather by a mounting tide of the names of lost battles from either side Chickamauga and Franklin, Vicksburg and Corinth and Atlanta — battles lost not alone because of superior numbers and failing ammunition and stores, but because of generals who should not have been generals, who were generals not through training in contemporary methods or aptitude for learning them, but by the divine right to say "Go there" conferred upon them by an absolute caste system; or because the generals of it never lived long enough to learn how to fight massed cautious accretionary battles, since they were already as obsolete as Richard or Roland or du Guesclin, who wore plumes and cloaks lined with scarlet at twenty-eight and thirty and thirty-two and captured warships with cavalry charges but not grain nor meat nor bullets, who would whip three separate armies in as many days and then tear down their own fences to cook meat robbed from their own smokehouses, who on one night and with a handful of men would gallantly set fire to and destroy a million dollar garrison of enemy supplies and on the next night be discovered by a neighbor in bed with his wife and be shot to death
Is this accurate?
That was a very long sentence. I assume the point was to create tension.
>>354961
Nah, it was just a warmup. Ever read The Bear?
>>354458
>>They both bore it as though in deliberate flagellant exaltation of physical misery transmogrified into the spirits' travail of the two yo
this is where I tapped out and stopped reading
>>355100
Pleb lad
tl;dr
I assume he's defending or making excuses for the Confederacy in which case he's wrong and a shit.
Holy fucking run on sentence Batman.
Jesus Christ, is this a fucking Bulwer-Lytton entry?
>>354458
It's a significant piece of the picture that is frequently forgotten.
>>356173
The exact opposite is true, but you'll never know because you're too illiterate to read sentences with more than 10 words in them.
>>357099
Protip : none of them have ever read Hegel.
Based
>>354458
>but because of generals who should not have been generals
And this is where I stopped reading.
Johnston (who commanded for both Atlanta and Vicksburg) and Bragg (who commanded for Chickamauga) were not random fucking guys. They had long, distinguished military backgrounds littered with success.
Except the CSA had, for the most part, excellent leadership that kept the afloat despite otherwise being at a disadvantage in every countable way to the Union.
Lee, Jackson, Johnson, the other Johnson, Beaugard, Jeb Stewart, Wheat and his Tigers, Nathan Forrest, I could go on and on: The CSA up and down had great leaders, many of whom had served in the Mexico-US war or where highly trained at West Point.
Even guys who should have fucking sucked like Richard Taylor, who was the son of a President of the US and a brother in law to Jeff Davis, who got up the chain of command because of his connections, rose to the occasion and became a good military leader.
If the CSA had just half the resources and logistic ability the north did throughout the way, their leadership could have gotten the US to break and offer a peace deal. CSA commanders time and time again managed to beat the odds and milk better Kill to death ratios out of battles where the numbers should have worked against them. The Army of Northern Virginia in particular pulled this off time and time again.
>>362364
>tfw when the war would have been so different if Stonewall hadn't died
:-(
>>362377
It's hard to know; while Stonewall's record is generally superb, he had a blunder here and there. But he had good reason for it: The poor man generally only got 4 hours of sleep a night for 2 years straight, him and and his troops. Stonewall's aggressive tactics constantly put Union commanders on the backfoot but they mentally and physically drained himself and his troops. He was stressed out by so often having to be the man to think of the plan that'd outwit the enemy. It's a lot of pressure not just to be the man of the hour, but the man of the year.
There were times during the war he had to march his troops 60 miles in 2 days, most of whom had shoes falling apart or no shoes at all, in order to cut his enemies off. I don't want to say Lee "depended" on Stonewall ability to flank the enemy, but he call on it often.
>>362441
I guarantee he flanks the Union line on July 2nd, 1863.
