It looked like we had been bombed in a big war, the whole city was on fire everywhere.

Houses are just burned down that nobody could ever get to. Instantly, there were 15 or 20 houses on fire at same time and no way to get around to all of them.

One of the main reasons that it is so easy to march men off to war," says Ernest Becker, is that "each of them feels sorry for the man next to him who will die.

All day today there was so much smoke it was like nighttime.

Stand your ground. Don't fire unless fired upon. But if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.

On the last morning of Virginia's bloodiest year since the Civil War, I built a fire and sat facing a window of darkness where at sunrise I knew I would find the sea.