Michael Shaara Quotes

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.

He had forgotten the Cause. When the guns began firing he had forgotten it completely.

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

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.

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.

If the war goes on-and it will, it will-what else can we do but go on? It is the same question forever, what else can we do? If they fight, we will fight with them. And does it matter after all who wins? Was that ever really the question? Will God ask that question, in the end?

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

Just put one man behind a tree. You can hardly see him from two hundred yards away, but he can see you. And shoot. And shoot again. How many men do you think it will take to get to that man behind the tree, in a ditch, defended by cannon, if you have to cross an open field to get him? How many men? Well, I've figured it. At least three. And he'll kill at least two.

But he was fighting for the dignity of man and in that way he was fighting for himself. If men were equal in America, all these former Poles and English and Czechs and lacks, then they were equal everywhere, and there was really no such thing as a foreigner; there were only free men and slaves. And so it was not even patriotism but a new faith. The Frenchman may fight for France, but the American fights for mankind, for freedom; for the people, not the land.

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.

I was trying to warn you. But... you have no Cause. You and I, we have no Cause. We have only the army. But if a soldier fights only for soldiers, he cannot ever win. It is only the soldiers who die.

But the men marched believing they were behind McClellan. He was the only general Chamberlain had ever seen who was truly loved. The Rebs loved Lee, no doubt of that. And we loved Mac. Chamberlain thought: Two things an officer must do, to lead men. This from old Ames, who never cared about love: You must care for your men's welfare. You must show physical courage.

Here we judge you by what you do, not by who your father was. Here you can be something. Here's a place to build a home. It isn't the land-there's always more land. it's the idea that we all have value, you and me, we're worth something more than the dirt. I never saw dirt I'd die for, but I'm not asking you to come join us and fight for dirt. What we're all fighting for, in the end, is each other.

It is unbecoming to a soldier, all this book-learning.