ling for you."
Taking me, at the close of our interview, from his private office into
the public room, where General Garfield and others were, he turned and
asked if it was all right--if I was satisfied. I expressed my thanks,
shook hands with him, and left, feeling a thousand times more attached
to him, and more respect for him than I had ever felt before. He had the
power to crush me, for at this time he is almost omnipotent in this
department, and by a simple word he might have driven me from the army,
disgraced in the estimation of both soldiers and citizens. His
magnanimity and kindness, however, lifted a great load from my spirits,
and made me feel like a new man; and I am very sure that he felt better
and happier also, for no man does a generous act to one below him in
rank or station, without being recompensed therefor by a feeling of the
liveliest satisfaction. I may have been too sensitive, and may not,
probably did not, realize fully the necessity for prompt action, and the
weight of responsibility which rested upon the General. There are times
when there is no time for explanation; great exigencies, in the presence
of which lives, fortunes, friendships, and all matters of lesser
importance must give way; moments when men's thoughts are so
concentrated on a single object, and their whole being so wrought up,
that they can see nothing, know nothing, but the calamity they desire to
avert, or the victory they desire to achieve. Nashville had been
threatened. To have lost it, or allowed it to be gutted by the enemy,
would have been a great misfortune to the army, and brought down upon
Rosecrans not only the anathemas of the War Department, but would have
gone far to lose him the confidence of the whole people. He supposed the
enemy's movements had been checked, and was startled and thrown off his
balance by discovering that they were still unopposed. The error was
attributable in part possibly to me, in part to a series of blunders,
which had resulted from the fact that there were two persons in the army
of the same name and rank, but mainly to those who failed to transmit
the order in proper time.

29. Our large tents have been taken away, and shelter tents substituted.
This evening, when the boys crawled into the latter, they gave
utterance, good-humoredly, to every variety of howl, bark, snap, whine,
and growl of which the dog is supposed to be capable.

Colonel George Humphreys, Eighty-eighth Indiana, whom I