It is important to understand how leaders have adapted and thought about war and warfare across their careers. 'The Autobiography of General Ulysses S. Grant: Memoirs of the Civil War' is perhaps the best war memoir ever written.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I've read a lot of war writing, even World War I writing, the British war poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves's memoir 'Goodbye to All That,' and a civilian memoir, 'Testament of Youth,' by Vera Brittain.
'Undertones of War' by Edmund Blunden seems to get less attention than the memoirs of Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, but it is a great book.
The American war-writing tradition is a proud one and booming in this era of the Global War on Terror - at least in the nonfiction realm. Hundreds of memoirs and press accounts from Iraq and Afghanistan have been published since 9/11.
I love general history. That's all I read really. I don't read novels, I read history. I love it. I live in an area that's really rich in Civil War history. I live in Kentucky on a farm. A lot of revolution, a lot of military history I love.
I don't think I would have written a combat novel if I had just had peacetime military training. I think, in fact, I probably would have remained a poet and just written a short story every now and then.
At times, the reader of World War II literature must think every American, from general to G.I., kept a war diary, later mined for memoirs of the conflict. Few diaries, however, were published in their own right.
War is tragedy. The great war stories are tragedies. It's the failure of diplomacy. 'War and Peace,' 'A Farewell to Arms,' 'For Whom the Bell Tolls.' Those are some of the greatest tragedies.
When I was growing up in Virginia, the Civil War was presented to me as glorious with dramatic courage and military honor. Later, I realized how death was central to the reality. It was at the core of women's lives. It's what they talked about most.
The events of the Civil War are so odd, ferocious, and poignant that fictional characters do well simply to inhabit them.
The only lesson to extract from any civil war is that it's pointless and futile and ugly, and that there is nothing glamorous or heroic about it. There are heroes, but the causes are never heroic.