It was during this battle, watching the carnage from
Lee's Hill, that
Robert E. Lee famously said:
"It is well that war is so terrible, lest we grow too fond of it."
It is a phrase that I find interesting. It captures all of the fighting man's fascination for war, and the admission that war is terrible. Despite being terrible, war fascinates nearly everybody: think of our videogames, of the movies and of the many books about the subject.
Still, it remains a subject that is terrible in the sense that it should inspire awe: it is outside the everyday's flow of things.
I suspect that war makes people feel terribly alive, unless they are dead. Lee captured the contrast between the exhilaration of the warrior and the horror of the reasonable man (which apparently he was).