Michael Shaara

"General Meade has his son as adjutant." "That's different. Generals can do anything. Nothing quite so much like God on earth as a general on a battlefield."

Honor without intelligence is a disaster. Honor could lose the war.

Some of us volunteered to fight for Union. Some came 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.

"It's no good trying to get yourself killed, General. The Lord will come for you in His own time."

One thing I'm very glad to see. Your General Lee is a moralist, as are all true gentlemen, of course, but he respects minor vice, harmless vice, when he finds it in others. Now that's the mark of a true gentlemen. That is what distinguishes the man so to me, aside from his military prowess, of course. The true gentlemen has no vices, but he allows you your own.

Oh, by the way, there's a story going around, do you know? They say that General Lee was asleep, and the army was marching by, and fifteen thousand men went by on tiptoe so as not to wake him.

They are volunteers: last of the great volunteer armies, for the draft is beginning that summer in the North. They have lost faith in their leaders but not in themselves.

Men cannot be threatened into the kind of fight they will have to put up to win. They will have to be led.

"I don't know what else we could have done. Sir, I'm sorry. But it started out as a minor scrap with a few militia and the next thing I know I'm tangling with half the Union Army."

The man was looking his way, with glasses. Buford waved. You never knew what old friend was out there. The Reb officer took off his hat, bowed formally.