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Killer Angels and Glory Essay Every soldier in an army seems to have their own story of why they choose to fight in a war, yet when one looks at a war they see one
as doomed to miss it's mark and pictures himself ending up on the other side of the murder, floored by it's consequences; "Vaulting Ambition, which o'erleaps itself
Submitted by smass489 on January 16, 2006
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Every soldier in an army seems to have their own story of why they choose to fight in a war, yet when one looks at a war they see one army against another, the individual no longer matters. There is no such thing as an individual in battle or in war. When war is studied there are the armies that fought and the leaders that led those armies. The leaders are the ones that are credited for a win and reprimanded for a loss. The Killer Angels, a historical fiction by Michael Shaara that recounts the events of the Battle of Gettysburg by giving a personal account of the key figures in the war, and Glory, a movie directed by Edward Zwick about the union's fifty fourth all black regiment and their growth throughout the civil war, both show how the individual is no longer important during wartime, but how the leaders in the war, Robert E. Lee, Joshua Chamberlain, Robert Gould Shaw, must work to bring honor and victory for their soldiers and prove themselves to be worthy of being called leaders and the representatives of their soldiers.
Robert E. Lee realizes that to win the war would immediately deify him as a hero, but to lose the war is to make his military career a failure. Because Lee knows this unspoken agreement, he takes full responsibility for losing the battle of Gettysburg.
No blame can be attached to the army for its failure to accomplish what was projected by me. . . . I alone am to blame, in perhaps expecting too much of its prowess and valor . . . could I have foreseen that the attack on the last day would fail, I should certainly have tried some other course . . . but I do not know what better course I could have pursued. (Shaara 349)
If he had won the glory of victory would have been his.
Throughout the story Lee is the embodiment of the confederate army. His soldiers follow him without question. There is only General Lee and the rest of the army. The soldiers' identities are unimportant. It was Lee that made the decisions of...
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