ter, he was a past master in the arts of war. He had
divined his opponent's plan from the moment of his first movement.

By April the 30th, Hooker had effected his crossing and slipped into the
rear of Lee's left wing. The Southerner had paid little attention to
Sedgwick's menace on his front. He left but nine thousand men on Marye's
Heights to hold in check this forty thousand, and by a rapid night march
suddenly confronted Hooker in the Wilderness before Chancellorsville.

So strong was the Union General's position he issued an exultant order
to his army in which he declared:

"The enemy must now flee shamefully or come out of his defences to
accept battle on our own ground, to his certain destruction."

The enemy had already slipped out of his defenses before Fredericksburg
and at that moment was feeling his way through the tangled vines and
undergrowth with sure ominous tread.

The soul of the Confederate leader rose with elation at the prospect
before him. In this tangle called the Wilderness, broken only here and
there by small, scattered farm houses and fields, the Grand Army of the
Republic had more than twice his numbers, and nearly three times as many
big guns, but his artillery would be practically useless. It was utterly
impossible to use four hundred great guns in such woods. Lee's one
hundred and seventy were more than he could handle. It would be a fight
between infantry at close range. The Southerner knew that no army of men
ever walked the earth who would be the equal, man for man, with these
grey veteran dead shots, who were now silently creeping through the
undergrowth of their native woods.

On May the 1st, their two lines came into touch and Lee felt of his
opponent by driving in his skirmishers in a desultory fire of artillery.

On the morning of May the 2nd, the two armies faced each other at close
range.

With Sedgwick's division of forty thousand men now threatening Lee's
rear from Fredericksburg, his army thus caught between two mighty lines
of blue, Hooker was absolutely sure of victory. The one thing of which
he never dreamed was that Lee would dare, in the face of such a death
trap, to divide his own small army. And yet this is exactly what the
Southerner decided to do contrary to all the rules of military science
or the advice of the strange, silent figure on the little sorrel horse.

When Lee, Jackson and Stuart rode along the lines of Hooker's front that
fatal May morning, Jackso