Leej, I understand your point fully, and perhaps you are right. History is riddled with unwilling martyrs and I can MORE that assure you that I too believe there was no glory to be found. The only part of your last sentence that chills me is that none who come after will understand. I see evidence every day that you are right. Some of it is here on these threads of the past few days. I don't want to rehash it forever and I too have a certain "let the dead bury the dead" feel about those times.

But I imagine, indeed know it true, that its a feeling shared by multitudes of others engaged in the struggles of which history is made. I'm sure you've read Longstreet's remarks when they opened the battlefield memorial at Chickamauga. Years later, with the wisdom of age, we look at our youth and the times through different eyes. But our eyes are the ones which saw it then and if there is meaning to be found (?), it has to come from those who saw it then. Most assuredly, the events and consequences will be recorded and I would like to believe that future generations will read of them in the most accurate way possible and know that the fight then was as inevitable as a hundred years before.

.....and thanks for the story.

Spaw