Free On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society by Dave Grossman Page A

F I R E R S T H R O U G H O U T H I S T O R Y
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    When presented with this data, some respond that they are specific to a civil war in which "brother fought brother." Dr.
    Jerome Frank answers such claims clearly in his book Sanity and Survival in the Nuclear Age, in which he points out that civil wars are usually more bloody, prolonged, and unrestrained than other types of war. And Peter Watson, in War on the Mind, points out that "deviant behavior by members of our own group is perceived as more disturbing and produces stronger retaliation than that of others with whom we are less involved." We need only look at the intensity of aggression between different Christian factions in Europe in the past and in Ireland, Lebanon, and Bosnia today, or the conflict between Leninist, Maoist, and Trotskyist Communists, or the horror in Rwanda and other African tribal battles, to confirm this fact.
    It is my contention that most of these discarded weapons on the battlefield at Gettysburg represent soldiers who had been unable or unwilling to fire their weapons in the midst of combat and then had been killed, wounded, or routed. In addition to these twelve thousand, a similar proportion of soldiers must have marched off that battlefield with similarly multiloaded weapons.
    Secretly, quietly, at the moment of decision, just like the 80 to 85 percent of World War II soldiers observed by Marshall, these soldiers found themselves to be conscientious objectors who were unable to kill their fellow man. This is the root reason for the incredible ineffectiveness of musket fire during this era. This is what happened at Gettysburg, and if you look deeply enough you will soon discover that this is also what happened in the other black-powder battles about which we do not necessarily have the same kind of data.
    A case in point is the Battle of Cold Harbor.
    "Eight Minutes at Cold Harbor"
    The Battle of Cold Harbor deserves careful observation here, since it is the example that most casual observers of the American Civil War would hold up to refute an 80 to 85 percent nonfiring rate.
    In the early morning hours of the third of June 1864, forty thousand Union soldiers under the command of Ulysses S. Grant 26 KILLING AND THE E X I S T E N C E OF R E S I S T A N C E
    attacked the Confederate army at Cold Harbor, Virginia. The Confederate forces under Robert E. Lee were in a carefully prepared system of trenches and artillery emplacements unlike anything that Grant's Army of the Potomac had ever encountered.
    A newspaper correspondent observed that these positions were
    "intricate, zig-zagged lines within lines . . . lines built to enfilade an opposing line, lines within which lies a battery [of artillery]."
    By the evening of the third of June more than seven thousand attacking Union soldiers were killed, wounded, or captured while inflicting negligible damage on the well-entrenched Confederates.
    Bruce Catton, in his superb and definitive multivolume account of the Civil War, states, "Offhand, it would seem both difficult and unnecessary to exaggerate the horrors of Cold Harbor, but for some reason — chiefly, perhaps, the desire to paint Grant as a callous and uninspired butcher — no other Civil War battle gets as warped a presentation as this one."
    Catton is referring largely to exaggerated accounts of Union casualties (usually claiming the thirteen thousand casualties of two weeks' fighting at Cold Harbor as the casualty rate for the one day's fighting), but he also debunks the very common misconception that seven thousand (or even thirteen thousand) casualties occurred in
    "Eight Minutes at Cold Harbor." This belief is not so much wrong as it is a gross oversimplification. It is quite correct that most of the isolated, disjointed Union charges launched at Cold Harbor were halted in the first ten to twenty minutes, but once the attackers' momentum was broken the attacking Union soldiers did not flee, and the killing did not end. Catton notes