Margaret Mitchell Quotes
Scarlett's mind went back through the years to the still hot noon at Tara when grey smoke curled above a blue-clad body and Melanie stood at the top of the stairs with Charles' sabre in her hand. Scarlett remembered that she had thought at the time: 'How silly! Melly couldn't even heft that sword!' But now she knew that had the necessity arisen, Melanie would have charged down those stairs and killed the Yankee - or been killed herself.
Mitchell, Margaret. Gone with the Wind. Macmillan, 1936.
In a massive terror campaign captured Republican males were shot and the Republican women were raped as a matter of the General’s policy. He would commonly broadcast—see {592113}—what had and would happen to Republicans who remained loyal to the government and continued to fight. It was the actions of men like this that led to the modifications of the Geneva Conventions.
Islamic fundamentalist terrorists demanding an independent Islamic state in the middle of Russia had terrorized the people of the capital extorting money, beheading people and stealing property to fund their activities. The Russian military came in to attack the terrorists but with such a heavy hand that they did not distinguish very well between the terrorists and the regular civilian population, even torturing inhabitants suspected of aiding the terrorists when the suspects themselves had been tortured and threatened by the terrorists and they had seen many who did not cooperate killed. The people—and especially the women—were caught in the middle.
The South could not replenish their lost arms and munitions nor could they replace most of the men wounded, killed or taken prisoner. The Union could do both. Therefore as long as the Union army inflicted casualties, it mattered little who won which battle as long as the fighting was in the South. This critical strategic reality was never appreciated by the Union Generals who were generally reluctant to take large casualties. When Grant and Sherman finally were able to set the strategy of attrition in operation, the Union actually won most of the battles though he and Grant took very high casualties. The casualties of the Confederates were generally higher but they did not have to be for the Union to win. The Civil War was a strategic form of suicide. Ironically, at a few points the rebellion might have succeeded because of the incompetent and timid Union military leadership at the beginning of the war.
Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell was an American novelist and journalist. Mitchell wrote only one novel, published during her lifetime, the American Civil War-era novel Gone with the Wind, for which she won the National Book Award for Most Distinguished Novel of 1936 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937. In recent years long after her death, a collection of Mitchell's girlhood writings and a novella she wrote as a teenager, titled Lost Laysen, have been published. A collection of newspaper articles written by Mitchell for The Atlanta Journal was republished in book form.
