can still bring tears to my eyes.
It's at the end of Glory Road, the second volume of his trilogy on the Army of the Potomac.
He talks about all the wounded left behind after the armies left the scene, how the people of Gettysburg were flooded with desperately wounded men who outnumbered the entire population of the village several times over. The ambulances for the rebel wounded alone stretched for miles, and those were only those able to be moved. The most severely wounded on both sides were left where they fell. Even worse, when the armies moved off they took with them most of their doctors and orderlies, leaving it to the civilians to try to provide some semblance of care.
But to me the most moving scene comes some time after. A Union officer, reviewing some of the troops, calls for cheers for General Meade. The field is absolutely silent. The officers all huddle, thinking they have some kind of incipient mutiny on their hands. Bear in mind that after McClellan was fired by Lincoln there had been all this talk about "changing front on Washington,"--that the army would itself revolt and try to depose the Lincoln administration. General Hooker said publicly that what the country needed was a military dictatorship. Lincoln famously wrote him a letter about this when he appointed Hooker commander of the army.
Anyway, after a long moment of silence one of the soldiers stepped forward to reassure the officers. It wasn't that the men were angry at Meade or anyone else, and they meant no disrespect. It was just that, after what they'd seen during the battle, none of them felt like cheering.
I love Catton's writing, despite his badmouthing abolitionists and progressive Republicans as "extremist." But then his pox on both your houses take on the origins of the war was the popular view at the time. His contribution was how he used letters, diaries, and regimental histories to tell the story from the enlisted soldiers' point of view. Up until then almost all the histories were of the "Battles and Leaders" variety--lots of prose about generals and strategy and tactics, very little about what that war was like on the ground for those who had to suffer through it.
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