What Don Would Do In Retirement, If He Ever Retires

Hood moves to flank the Union left on the second day of Gettysburg, one of the great what ifs of American history.

If you take a flat map
And move wooden blocks upon it strategically,
The thing looks well, the blocks behave as they should.
The science of war is moving live men like blocks.
And getting the blocks into place at a fixed moment.
But it takes time to mold your men into blocks
And flat maps turn into country where creeks and gullies
Hamper your wooden squares. They stick in the brush,
They are tired and rest, they straggle after ripe blackberries,
And you cannot lift them up in your hand and move them.
–A string of blocks curling smoothly around the left
Of another string of blocks and crunching it up–
It is all so clear in the maps, so clear in the mind,
But the orders are slow, the men in the blocks are slow
To move, when they start they take too long on the way–
The General loses his stars and the block-men die
In unstrategic defiance of martial law
Because still used to just being men, not block-parts.

Stephen Vincent Benet, John Brown’s Body

Flanking the Union army on its left might have worked, but it was the smart move in any case.  The Union position was simply too strong to take by frontal assault.  Even if the Confederates had taken Little Round Top in the historical fight, by that time Hood’s division was so beat up that little probably could have been done even holding Little Round Top.  The frontal assault was deadly military malpractice, and Longstreet and Hood were both correct to protest it.