If the people raise a howl against my barbarity and cruelty, I will answer that war is war, and not popularity seeking.

The thing about this march is it was totally different than the rest of the war, as bloody and brutal and awful as it was.

The wretched war had destroyed not only their country but all their presumptions of human self-regard. What a scant, foolish pretense was a family, a culture, a place in history, when it was all so easily defamed. And God was behind this.

If the people raise a great howl against my barbarity and cruelty, I will answer that war is war, and not popularity seeking

You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out. I know I had no hand in making this war, and I know I will make more sacrifices to-day than any of you to secure peace.

So what this is is a 'road novel.' Eventually entire civilization (in the South) had been uprooted and people found security only in movement, ... That interested me enormously ... A friend from New Orleans, he said when he read the book, 'This is like Hurricane Katrina.'