learn, was perceived by them at an early day, and they showed their willingness to rush upon works in 1862 at Fort Donelson, Williamsburg, and Yorktown. Gen. Smith's Vermonters forced the passage of Warwick's creek waist-deep in water, and carried the enemy's works, and the 1st Massachusetts charged 800 yards under fire, and captured a field work as early as April, 1862, at Yorktown. At Fredericksburg our divisions made a succession of determined and desperate charges. They followed one after the other from morning till night. We lost over 7,000 killed and wounded in these charges. They did not fail from reluctance to go forward. The deadly fire from the triple lines behind the wall in our front struck down so many that by the time the men were within assaulting distance there were not enough left to close the ranks for the assault. But the lines did not stop to deliver their fire until their formation was destroyed by their losses. Their dead were found within twenty-five yards of the enemy's line.

The critic who attempts to weigh the conduct of our volunteers by the amount of fighting at close quarters, as compared with that in former wars, is in danger of being misled, because the conditions have been changed so much by the increase of the range and efficiency of arms.

If we compare our battles with those of the Franco-German war of 1870, we shall see that our men do not suffer by it. In the great battle of Gravelotte, the village of St. Marie aux Chenes was taken from the French by an attack on two sides. On account of the absence of cover,

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and the long range of the French Chassepot rifles, the Jagers of the Saxon Guards, who made the attack on one side, had to advance in open skirmish order, and, although this order afforded a poor mark to the French riflemen, yet the historians say the Jagers had to go forward in a series of rushes of about two hundred yards each, and, throwing themselves flat on the ground, to recommence their fire," and the last rush was deferred until the French evacuated the village. In this same battle, the village of St. Privat was taken by the Germans. It stood at the top of a slope like that which engineers make in front of a fort and term the glacis, about two miles long, and was surrounded by a wall consisting mainly of massive stone houses, and had been fortified by the French for a general support of their whole right wing. Eighteen thousand of the Prussian Guards, the best trained soldiers of the German empire, attempted to carry the village by advancing up the slope about the same distance that our troops marched under fire at Fredericksburg. The very friendly historians from whom this account is derived say that the commander of the assaulting force, on account of its great losses, gave orders to suspend the attack, while his skirmishers were yet 400 paces from the French, to await a flank attack by the Saxons, without which, these historians say, "it was impossible to carry out the last decisive attack."

The Prussian Guards lost 8,000 out of 25,000 to 30,000 in this battle-twenty-seven to thirty-two per At Fredericksburg, December

cent.

13, 1862, Hancock's division advanced over open ground in the face of the most destructive storm of cannon shots and bullets, and left its dead within twenty-five yards of the enemy's line. It lost 2,169 out of its 5,000 men-over forty-three per cent. The greatest loss of any German battalion of 1,000 men at Gravelotte was fifty per cent. Eight of Hancock's regiments, numbering 2,548 men, lost 1,324-nearly fifty-two per cent. at Fredericksburg. On the 3d of May, 1863, Sedgwick's division carried this same position at Fredericksburg by an assault impetuous enough to satisfy the most exacting military critic.

The assault is necessary where a fortified position is to be taken in battle, but with the disappearance of the musket of slow fire and short range such tactics become foolhardy where an attack is to be made on troops of good morale in open ground. To rush toward such a line while it fires on the assaulting line is to court destruction. The attacking party must send bullet for bullet Pickett's charge at Gettysburg showed this.

get a pretty low opinion of them from such praise. In Virginia an officer who opened fire with small arms at 500 yards would have been thought light-headed, and our army officers to-day would look upon fire at more than that distance as wasted.

It is true that the Chassepot of 1870 carried farther than the Springfield rifle of 1861, but the point blank range of the former was only 300 yards, while that of the latter was 200 yards. Point blank range is that at which the rifle barrel points at the mark. At any longer range the rifle must point upward. To reach 1,500 yards, as the French tried to do, would require the rifle barrels to point toward the stars. Difference in arms, country, and adversaries renders absolute comparisons of the conduct of soldiers of different nations very difficult. But the ratio of killed and wounded in a series of battles affords a comparison which is a good test of character, because in the long run it is the killing and wounding that most tries the manhood and soldiership of an army. The following is a comparison of these ratios in our army and the German army in the FrancoGerman war of 1870, the greatest of modern times, excepting ours:

Battles. Viouville Gravelotte. Worth.. Sedan.. 1861-5.

Gettysburg..

Stone's River. Chickamauga.. Fredericksburg.

Wilderness. Antietam... Chancellorsville Cold Harbor.. Fair Oaks...

If asked to name the most prominent traits of the Northern volunteers

in battle, I should not name impetuosity, because, whether it was due to the caution of our generals or the coldness of our temperament, this quality was not conspicuous in our actions; but I should say steadfastness and tenacity. Their steadfastness was proven times without number in the battles fought in the obscurity of the Southern forests. The general, unable to see either the enemy or his own men, had to depend upon the ranks to stay where he placed them until the din of arms could guide him to the point of attack. The men, in their turn, had to meet an unseen foe, and fight the battle upon the faith that their flanks were covered, and that aid would come when needed. This trait averted panics. No surprise, no flight of any part of the army, ever brought on a general rout.

At White Oak Swamp, in June, 1862, 20,000 of our men, pursuing the

march in retreat which had been ordered by McClellan, crossed the bridge in the night, and threw themselves down upon the plain above to sleep after a weary night march. Contrary to all military rules, they were massed thickly, with no attempt at forming a line of battle to face the enemy who was following. The men gave themselves no thought as to whether their generals had reason for halting them in the confused order in which they lay, but fell asleep behind their stacks of arms. The fiery Jackson, fresh from the victory at Gaines Mill, came silently to the bluff on the other side of the swamp, and, without warning, opened fire upon the sleeping host with twenty-eight cannon. The men, awakened by the roar of cannon and

the explosion of shells amid them, sprang into the ranks and seized their guns, and waited for the command of their officers. Solid shot tore through the mass, and bursting shells buried their deadly fragments everywhere. The uproar was appalling, and, to provoke disorder, a wild flight of pontoon and baggage teams swept across the plain, trampling down everything before them. But at the command, the many crowded columns swiftly deployed into lines, facing the enemy's skirmishers, made ready to meet his advance; batteries whirled to the front and opened fire, and when Jackson, eager to press forward, attempted to push his infantry against us, he found, instead of a disordered mass demoralized by the iron hail from his batteries, a succession of well ordered lines of battle, the first of which alone was sufficient to repel his attack. It was steadfastness of the most exalted type that preserved our men from panic that day.

At Chancellorsville the 11th corps was routed as evening came on, and thousands streamed back to, and even through, the other lines; but these lines were undisturbed, and Berry's division advanced right into the gap left by the beaten corps and into the darkness of the night which had come on, and, moving steadily on against their invisible foe, opened fire upon them with a regular and thundering roll of musketry which lighted the field of battle like a sheet of lightning, and stopped the onset of the enemy.

At Fisher's Hill, when half of Sheridan's army was routed in his absence, the other half kept a good

front, retreating in good order from position to position, and holding the enemy in check until Sheridan arrived, and then went forward with their great leader and his cavalry and utterly routed the enemy.

At the battle of Atlanta, the divisions of Smith and Leggett repulsed the attack of Hardee from the rear by leaping over their own breastworks and fighting from the other side, and then Leggett's division, indifferent as to the direction of the enemy, when Cheatham attacked on the original front, leaped back to the proper side of their works, and beat him back.

The tenacity of our men was displayed wherever they assaulted earthworks and were repulsed. In almost every instance they seized ground in advance of their starting-point, and held it, instead of retiring in discouragement. The mighty struggle over the salient at Spottsylvania, which lasted for twenty hours at such close quarters that the opposing flags were planted on the same parapets, and no man could live beside them, was the most conspicuous example of tenacity. The length of our battles was due to this quality. The most of our great battles lasted two or three days. European armies have seldom fought the second day.

I have said that many a volunteer realizes that he sacrificed what money could not compensate him for; but I believe that there is not one of them who would retrieve what he has lost by diminishing what the country has gained. They feel that they were fortunate to have lived in the great events of '61 to '65. They are proud to have borne arms for their country

in her time of need. But it is not in the triumph of success, or the glory of victory, or the poor guerdon of pensions, that they find their reward. It is the priceless heritage of selfgovernment in a free land, without danger of foreign encroachment or entanglements, which their fathers handed down, and which shall descend to their posterity. They have no fear for the stability of our institutions. That the majority is sometimes in the wrong, that bad men are elected to office, that men unlawfully band themselves together to interfere with the industries and extort unearned money from their fellow-citizens, are but transient evils in the estimation of the men who witnessed the arousal of the patient, long-suffering, and tolerant spirit of this great free people in 1861. The forebodings of danger to the republic from violence within which oppress some men find no lodgment in the imagination of the men who saw the sleeping soldier awakened in 2,000,000 citizens, and stood shoulder to shoulder among them, and felt the mighty impulse which moved them. They know that the love of law and order, the devotion to the political and personal freedom which insures the enjoyment of life and one's own, are inbred in this people, and are to be born in their children. When the last one of the great host of volunteers shall look back through the glimmering vista of the past, he will see none of these disturbances, for they will have been forgotten, and he will await the summons from on high in the serene confidence that this Union will be perpetual.