"Lee and Johnston have each fought a drawn battle.* Only a few more dead bodies stiff and stark on an unknown battlefield. For we do not so much as know where these drawn battles took place.
One can never exaggerate the horrors of war on one's own soil. You understand the agony, strive as you will to speak, the agony of heart—mind—body.
'A few more men killed.' A few more women weeping their eyes out, and nothing whatever decided by it more than we knew before the battle."
*On 25 March 1865, Robert E. Lee's troops suffered heavy losses in storming and then abandoning Fort Stedman, east of Petersburg, Virginia. A few days earlier, Joseph E. Johnston also sustained many losses when he unsuccessfully attacked one of Sherman's columns at Bentonville, North Carolina.
