It’s hard to know how true it is, as the man was a friend and there’s a sort of sense among Lost-Causers that it’s better if the people they lost to were almost supernaturally prescient, but one professor there claimed that Sherman, upon learning South Carolina seceded, said:
You people of the South don’t know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization!
You people speak so lightly of war; you don’t know what you’re talking about. War is a terrible thing! You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people but an earnest people, and they will fight, too. They are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it …
Besides, where are your men and appliances of war to contend against them? The North can make a steam engine, locomotive, or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or pair of shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical, and determined people on Earth—right at your doors. You are bound to fail. Only in your spirit and determination are you prepared for war.
In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with. At first you will make headway, but as your limited resources begin to fail, shut out from the markets of Europe as you will be, your cause will begin to wane. If your people will but stop and think, they must see in the end that you will surely fail.
It was after the war, in 1880, that he said in a speech “There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell.”
It goes well coupled with a quote of Lee as hallucinated by Trump:
Gettysburg. Wow. I go to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to look and to watch. And the statement of Robert E. Lee ― who’s no longer in favor, did you ever notice that? No longer in favor ― ‘Never fight uphill, me boys, never fight uphill.’ They were fighting uphill. He said, ‘Wow, that was a big mistake.’ He lost his great general, and they were fighting. ‘Never fight uphill, me boys!’ But it was too late.
That Cockblock Orange and his followers aren’t that far from what Sherman describes. In the erotic fiction of a new civil war they are all
schoolshoo…invulnerable, praised heroes. Most of them would die off due to unclean water, meals and wounds.History nerd me is wondering if he’s half-remembering something he was told about Little Round Top/Star Wars Episode III, and conflating that with Stonewall Jackson’s death at Chancellorsville.
Normal human me completely agrees with you. Even just within the American military tradition, it’s rarely the troops who saw the most death, or the officers who sent the largest number of them into it, who are the most gung ho about glassing countries and being badasses.
There are things, even flawed things, that might be worth fighting for, but nobody should ever be happy about it. And maybe this is a bit paternalistic of me, but if there are 20 year old idiots who think otherwise, then it’s up to their leaders to protect them (and everyone else) from those strong little boys’ worst instincts. If you make it into middle age and haven’t learned that, you’re probably a bad person.
There are things, even flawed things, that might be worth fighting for, but nobody should ever be happy about it. And maybe this is a bit paternalistic of me, but if there are 20 year old idiots who think otherwise, then it’s up to their leaders to protect them (and everyone else) from those strong little boys’ worst instincts. If you make it into middle age and haven’t learned that, you’re probably a bad person.
My russian ass felt this quote like a chainsaw insertion. Too many friends and relatives became too enthusiastic about the war overnight, after the first shock we all felt ended it’s grip. Some of them do know history, had served in the army to know how shit it is, and yet they start to feel like brave soldiers of fortune, thankfully, from their sofas and toilets mostly.
This war happened just at a time when most WW2 vets died, most Afghan\Chechnya vets retired and got out of picture, so there is no one to tell the bloodthirsty youth what’s the war is. I guess, US militant proud boys had the same boost.
