One of the nice things about being in the hospital is having time to read. Several weeks ago, Richard Taylor sent me a list of books – he had run into – on the Civil War and that started me reading A Stillness at Appomattox.

Reading this book has been painful at times, but – mostly – a joy. It is painful because it is paragraph after paragraph and page after page of General U. S. Grant sending men into the meat grinder of battle and a joy because it shows the slow change – with so many acts of grace and horror – of Grant’s Army transforming into a winner.

But the book is primarily a joy because of the power and beauty of the words. It is almost 400 pages of poetry. Here is a paragraph from page 213:

…There had been that dance for officers of the II Army Corps, in the raw pine pavilion above the Rapidan on Washington’s Birthday, and it had been a fine thing to see; and it had been a long good-by and a dreamy good night for the young men in bright uniforms and the women who tied their lives to them. Most of the men who danced at that ball were dead, now; dead or dragging themselves about hometown streets on crutches, or tapping their way along with a hickery cane to find the way instead of bright youthful eyes, or in hospitals where doctors with imperfect knowledge tried to patch them up enough to enable them to hope to get out of bed some day and sit in a chair by the window. There had been a romance to war once, or atleast some people said there was, and each one of these men had seen it, and they had touched the edge of it while the music played and the stacked flags swayed in the candlelight, and it all came down to this, with the drifting dust of the battlefields blowing from the imperfect mounds of hastily dug graves.