Jeff Shaara Gods and Generals

And they will learn something new about war, more than the quiet nightmare of leaving your home behind. They will learn something happens to men, men who have felt no satisfaction, who have absorbed and digested defeat after bloody stupid defeat, men who up to now have done mostly what they were told to do. And when those men begin to understand that it is not anything in them, no great weakness or inferiority, but that it is the leaders, the generals and politicians to tell them what to do, that the fault is there, after a while they stopped listening. Then the Beast, the collective anger, battered and bloodied, will strike out, will respond to the unending sights of horror, the deaths of friends and brothers, and it will not be fair or reasonable or just, since there is no intelligence in the beast. They will strike out at what ever presents itself, and here it was the harmless and innocent lives of the people of Fredericksburg. Jeff Shaara Gods and Generals page 353