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SITE ESTABLISHED FEBRUARY 19 2006 |
LAST UPDATED MAY 10 2008 |
A MEMENTO: Under What Circumstances Men Do Not Wish to Be Shot
An army has a personality. Beneath the individual thoughts and emotions of its component parts it thinks and feels as a unit. And in this large, inclusive sense of things lies a wiser wisdom than the mere sum of all that it knows. On that dismal morning this great brute force, groping at the bottom of a white ocean of fog among trees that seemed as sea weeds, had a dumb consciousness that all was not well; that a day's maneuvering had resulted in a faulty disposition of its parts, a blind diffusion of its strength. The men felt insecure and talked among themselves of such tactical errors as with their meager military vocabulary they were able to name. Field and line officers gathered in groups and spoke more learnedly of what they apprehended with no greater clearness. Commanders of brigades and divisions looked anxiously to their connections on the right and on the left, sent staff officers on errands of inquiry and pushed skirmish lines silently and cautiously forward into the dubious region between the known and the unknown.
—Ambrose Bierce, "One Kind of Officer" |
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Edward Leroy Tabler Papers Copyright © 2005 William Edward Henry. All Rights Reserved.
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