tics would have been eagerly sought after, instead of being looked
upon as an irksome daily task. Nor would it have been necessary for this
purpose to place raw troops in positions of critical importance. The
vast extent of our line of operations, and the wide tracts of
disaffected country which were, or _might easily have been_, left behind
it, offered an ample field for a training as thorough as the most rigid
martinet could desire, at a safe distance from any enemy in force, but
where they would have been kept under the _qui vive_ by the belief that
something was intrusted to them. Drill or no drill, I do not think there
was a colonel in the barracks who did not know that his men would have
been worth more if marched from the place of enlistment directly into
the open field, than they were after months in a place where the whole
tendency was to chill their patriotism by making them feel useless, and
to wear off the fine edge of their patriotism by subjection to the
merest mechanical process of instruction.

But without dwelling longer on a subject still so delicate as this, let
it be said that the advantages of the camp of instruction were
principally with the officers. These really learned many things they
needed to know, and perhaps unlearned some that they needed as much to
forget. I have hinted already at one of these latter lessons--that of
their own insignificance. Familiarity breeds contempt, even with
shoulder straps. It did the captains and majors and colonels, each of
whom had been for a time the particular hero of his own village or
county, not a little good to find themselves lost in the crowd, and
quite overshadowed by the stars of the brigadiers. Even these latter did
not look quite so portentous and dazzling when we saw them in whole
constellations, paling their ineffectual rays before the luminary of
headquarters. Many an ambitious youth, who had come from home with very
grand though vague ideas of the personal influence he was to have upon
the country's destinies, found it a wholesome exercise to stand in the
mud at the gate all day as officer of the guard, and touch his hat
obsequiously to the general staff. If there was good stuff in him he
soon got over the first disappointment, and learned to put his shoulder
more heartily to that of his men, when he found that his time was by no
means too valuable to be chiefly spent in very insignificant
employments. Some few, it is true, never could have done t