GDG- "Pickett's Charge" NOT a misnomer

[jack]

Faulkner touches, surreptitiously, on the silent tragedy that haunts the 
South....
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Robert Lawrence" <lawrence at rwlcpa.com>
To: "GDG" <gettysburg at arthes.com>
Sent: Friday, March 02, 2007 2:17 PM
Subject: RE: GDG- "Pickett's Charge" NOT a misnomer


Esteemed GDG Member Contributes:


Well regardless of what we call it this is still the best analysis of
the importance of the  Charge I have run across.

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he
wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two oclock on
that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the
rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled
flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his
long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in
the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word
and it's all in the balance, it happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet,
it not only hasn't begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin
against that position and those circumstances which made more men than
Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave yet it's going to
begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and
that moment doesn't even need a fourteen-year-old boy to think THIS
TIME. MAYBE THIS TIME with all this much to lose and all this much to
gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington
itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory....

---William Faulkner, INTRUDER IN THE DUST (1948) pp. 194-195