On that day, Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard was using this small church-more accurately, its predecessor-as his headquarters.  The scene that gave rise to today's quote may have happened here.

Whether here or close by, it was early afternoon on April 7, 1862, and Thomas Jordan, chief of staff to General Beauregard, talked to his boss about the army he commanded and the battle they were in.  The army was the Army of Mississippi with almost 45,000 men.  The battle was the Battle of Shiloh, named after Shiloh Church in southwestern Tennessee.  It was a two-day blood bath.

On the first day, April 6, Confederate forces under the command of General Albert Sidney Johnston had had the element of surprise and carried the day, though it cost Johnston his life.  On the Union side that evening, General Grant acknowledged the setback but added something.  "Lick 'em tomorrow, though," he said.  And, with the benefit of reinforcements, he did. 

It was in the midst of Grant's counter-attack on April 7 that Thomas Jordan spoke to General Beauregard about their situation, using the metaphor of a sugar cube.  He continued, "Would it not be judicious to get away with what we have?"  General Beauregard agreed and soon thereafter began to withdraw.  (Who knows? Maybe his good advice had something to do with then-Colonel Jordan being promoted to Brigadier General later that month.)

In terms of casualties, Gettysburg the following year was worse, but at the time Shiloh was the bloodiest battle in American military history.  Clearly, it was a victory for the North, but it was the kind of victory that calls to mind Wellington's post-Waterloo dispatch, in which he wrote, "Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won." 

If this short TTALK is a meditation, it is not primarily one on war or history.  Both are here, of course, and worth remembering, but today's entry is above all about language and specifically about metaphor.  The subject is one Robert Frost thought about a great deal.  Metaphor to him meant saying one thing in terms of another, and for him it was the key to both making and understanding.  In one expression of that thought he wrote:

Poetry, philosophy, science, military strategy.  And if you think back to Ash Carter's recent comparison of TPP to an aircraft carrier, you might be inclined to add trade policy.