CHAPTER XIV.

HOW THEY FIGHT.

Is there any other country in the world but America where whole armies, tens of thousands strong, with arms, artillery, and baggage, melt away like snow in summer, like the froth from an omelette soufflée, or the mirage in the Gulf of Finland? The Indians discovered by Peter Wilkins flitted from China to Peru by means of "graundees;" one would think that the Transatlantic hosts were composed of nought but flying Indians. And these perpetual flank movements, this system of burning up towns as though they were wasps' nests, laying whole tracts of country waste by means of raids, and fighting at a hundred and fifty miles from one's base of supplies? Was there ever a war in which great battles were followed, as in this, by no tangible results-in which the victors are unable to pursue their routed foe, and the defeated party turns up, a fortnight afterwards, as invaders of the most aggressive order? Mr. Carlyle sometimes loses his temper with his authorities, and rates the "Prussian Dryasdust" in unmeasured terms, because he cannot at once understand the intricacies of the Seven Years' War; but is it possible to conceive a more hopeless hash than even a contemporary Jomini, or Brialmont, or De Segur, resident in

Europe, would make of the technicalities of this struggle, or the desperate strait to which future historians will be reduced in order to give form and coherence to a narrative made up of telegrams, surmises, hopes, lies, partisan leading-articles, and events of which even those who have participated in them are impotent to give a rational and consistent account? When Napoleon the First was urged to write his memoirs "for the sake of Posterity," he replied very coolly that what he had done he had done, and that Posterity might put what construction she chose on it, and get out of the scrape as she could. In after ages, when the history of the American War becomes a labour urgently called for by another, and, let us trust, a more pacific generation, the Federals and Confederate writers of futurity will have to agree on some common theory purely mythical, on which they may assume facts both pro and con. And this is the way, I fancy, in which most histories have been written.

I observe that Colonel Charras, the able historian of the campaign of 1815, has gone out to America, and visited the seat of war. If he have any intention of writing a narrative of the American War of 1860-4, I most sincerely pity him. The best thing he could do would be to buy Mr. Frank Moore's "Rebellion Record," Mr. Greely's "History of the Rebellion," and Appleton's "American Cyclopedia," and going home, trust to a lively imagination for the rest. He might not, in the end, produce a work much more apocryphal than Victor Hugo's Waterloo episode in "Les Misérables," or Sir Walter Scott's "Life of Napoleon." There is certainly something to be learnt from M'Clellan's "Report;" but that scho

larly performance must be held as of the same family as Dr. Newman's "Apologia;" and is less a history than a laudably laborious endeavour to vindicate the fame of George Buriton M'Clellan. As to procuring any definite information from officers in either army, the task is hopeless. You may get a horse-shoe, but all four shoes will not give you a very tangible idea of the appearance of the horse. If even the taciturn General Grant could be induced to unbosom himself, I don't think his communications would amount to much more than what the Great Duke told the lady who pestered him for an account of the battle of Waterloo: "Well, ma'am, they pommelled us and we pommelled them." There was a "tag," however, to this well-known reply, which the American General, perchance, might be chary of using. Another remark of the Duke's, related in "Rogers's Table Talk," struck me very forcibly when I was camping down at Brandy Station. "When at our head-quarters in Spain," once related the Iron Duke, wished to see an army, and I gave directions that he should be conducted through ours. When he returned, he said, 'I have seen nothing-nothing but here and there little clusters of men in confusion-some cooking, some washing, and some sleeping.' Then you have seen an army,' I said." It took me a dozen columns to explain what the Duke of Wellington managed to make per fectly clear in half a dozen lines. His apophthegm, however, applies to all armies; it would have been as true of Hannibal's as of his own; but it would puzzle a Tacitus to give a true description of the manner of fighting adopted by Americans. When you look into that glass case at the United

Service Institution in Whitehall-yard, and scan Captain Siborne's wonderful model of the field of Waterloo, the view, with the assistance of a handbook, and perhaps the counsel of an intelligent non-commissioned officer, will give you a tolerable idea of what a battle is really like. There is the vast champaign, there the two heights, the dale between; there Hougomont; there the Belle Alliance; there Brainela-Leude; there the Forest of Soignies. Thence Blucher debouched; there Michaud's cuirassiers rode up to the English squares; there Picton fell. But no American officer with whom I have ever conversed could give me a succinct word-picture, much less a chart or plan, of the Battles of the Wilderness. It is all a haze, a tangle, a labyrinth, a muddle. It is like the misty chase of the characters after each other in the Midsummer Night's Dream, the mischievous genius of Puck setting all at cross purposes. One general has a notion that his adversary has massed large bodies of troops in a certain direction. His big. guns thunder for a while in that direction, and then he hurls huge masses of his own troops against where the enemy is supposed to be.

They advance till they find the fire from the opposite but invisible side too hot for them. Then they retreat, slowly or quickly, in good or in bad order, as their pluck and stamina may be strong or feeble. As the sound of their firing grows fainter, the opposite and still invisible foe advance. The next day you read in the newspapers that the Federals drove the Confederates, or vice versa, three miles. "Being driven " implies the idea of one man running away as fast as his legs can carry him from the hot pursuit of another man; for

example, Horace Vernet's woodcut of Napoleon scampering away at Toulon from an English sailor, who at last gives up the pursuit, but bestows on him a parting lunge with his bayonet, which wounds him in the thigh, conveys a substantial idea of "driving." But could any man, even with half a dozen pairs of air-pumps and as many pairs of bagpipes for lungs, be "driven" three miles? A centipede couldn't do it: Deerfoot would be winded at it; the steam leg would break down at it. So is it with the colloquialism, "The enemy were whipped handsomely." The pugilistic gentlemen who keep the ring at prize fights manage to get a pretty good purchase with their gutta-percha whips, and a Cossack can reach far over the heads of a crowd with his sinuous lash; but it is difficult to realise the possibility of "whipping" an enemy whom you don't see, and who is but just within rifle range. It would be quite safe to say that, save in isolated skirmishes, the Federals and Confederates have not crossed bayonets, nor the officers used their swords, half a dozen times within the last four years. Indeed, the belligerents very seldom see each other, much less look "at the whites of their eyes." I asked an officer who had been all through the Potomac campaigns what the Confeds were like. "Well," he says, "I've seen plenty of them dead; but alive and in masses, all I can say is that they have a kind of warm dust colour." A more painful account of what civilians imagine to be a scene of bustle, cheering, drumming, and trumpeting, "fights for the standard" after the style of Mr. Ansdell's picture, and hand-to-hand combats à la Coburg melodrama, I heard from an officer who was actively engaged