as people both before and since have tried to evoke God or devil to justify them in what their glands insisted upon;

shade to tell him in person that it was all right,

talking about his Duek John of Lorraine as if he hoped possibly to evoke that condemned and excommunicated

yet could not reconcile himself – Henry citing himself authority for incest,

the one who did not yet know what he was going to do, the other who knew what he would have to do

—two, four, now two again, according to Quentin and Shreve, the two the four the two still talking —

a million dollar garrison of enemy supplies and on the next night be discovered by a neighbor in bed with his wife and be shot to death;

robbed from their own smokehouses, who on one night and with a handful of men would gallantly set fire to and destroy

who would whip three separate armies in as many days and then tear down their own fences to cook meat

at twenty-eight and thirty and thirty-two and captured warships with cavalry charges but no grain nor meat nor bullets,

lined with scarlet

since they were already as obsolete as Richard or Roland or du Guesclin, who wore plumes and cloaks

of it never lived long enough to learn how to fight masse cautious accretionary battles,

but by the divine right to say 'Go there' conferred upon them by an absolute caste system; or because the generals

who were generals no through training in contemporary methods or aptitude for learning them,

and failing ammunition and stores, but because of generals who should not have been generals,

Chickamauga and Franklin, Vicksburg and Corinth and Atlanta — battles lost not alone because of superior numbers

it but rather by a mounting tide of the names of lost battles from either side —

of an army having retreated across Alabama and Georgia and into Carolina swept onward not by a victorious army behind

then forty-seven and then forty-six, since it was '64 and then '65 and the starved and ragged remnant