Gettysburg

It has taken me several days to write about Gettysburg. Wholesale slaughter across 3 days with 41,000 casualties is not an easy thing to come to grips with. A new visitor centre opened earlier this year and it is worldclass in terms of facilities and presentation. The museum is extensive and deals not just with the battle of Gettysburg, but puts the battle into the context of the Civil War. It also deals with the aftermath of the battle rather well. When the battle was over and the Confederate army began retreating back to Virginia, the Union army followed leaving a small town to cope with thousands of dead unburied and thousands of injured soldiers. Every house was literally turned into a hospital rendering the houses unfit to live later on. Lincoln's Gettysburg address and his assassination and the rest of the Civil War were also effectively told. I took a National Parks bus tour of the battlefield which was excellent. The overwhelming thought through all this is of course that it is such a waste of human life.