A little bit of it all

Thunder rumbles and lightning flashes in the January sky. Heavy rain is overwhelming the gutters and adding to the flooding low spots in the yard. It is not your typical winter weather with temps expected near 60 today. So it goes. Things will even out and sub-zero air will balance nature before spring arrives.

It has been determined “we” will clean carpets this weekend, providing I can borrow my SIL’s carpet cleaner.

It occurs to me I make my wife out to be a demanding harridan on occasion in these pages. It is in fact just the opposite. She is sweet and kind.

She insists I tell you that. “Demands” might be a better word.

Seriously, she doesn’t even know I have a blog.

I’ve been reading a historical novel about the Franklin/Nashville Campaign. It is written in the Jeff and Michael Shaara way, history blended into a novel with the character’s thoughts etc. described. It is not bad for a free book. I guess it has not made a great impression. I cannot remember the title. I am not thrilled with the depiction of General George Thomas so far. But otherwise I am entertained. Isn’t that the whole point?

The scenes of the Battle of Franklin ring as fairly accurate, perhaps giving the Southern effort a little more success and glory than justified. But I have to take my own historical bias into account. Those of you who attach a Faulkner-like romance to Pickett’s Charge should look to Hood’s utter wasting of the Western Confederate Army in a charge across two miles of open ground against an entrenched Union Army.

At Franklin six Confederate Generals were killed, seven were wounded, and one captured and 55 Regimental Commanders were casualties. After the subsequent attacks at Nashville, Hood would squander half of his army.

As with much of the war the campaigns in the East grabbed headlines while the west slogged away in desperate bloody battles bungled more times than not by utter incompetence by Confederate leadership.

Edit: Die Like Men by Tim Kent