re: #66 ProTARDISLiberal

He suffered no such delusions about War. It sometimes is necessary and just, but it is always hell.

And what Sherman’s armies did to Atlanta and Columbia was not unprecedented. Mehmet Ali Pasha (Viceroy-Ruler of Egypt) and Mahmud II (Caliph of the Ottoman Empire, starter of the Tanzimat) ordered the annihilation of Diriyah in 1818 as a result of the horrors the Sauds unleashed in the Arabian Peninsula and Mesopotamia. Including a massacre in Karbala, where the Wahhabi armies butchered 4,000 men, women, and children.

The full quote:

I confess, without shame, that I am sick and tired of fighting — its glory is all moonshine; even success the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies, with the anguish and lamentations of distant families, appealing to me for sons, husbands, and fathers … it is only those who have never heard a shot, never heard the shriek and groans of the wounded and lacerated … that cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation. -William Tecumseh Sherman, 1865