their inability to keep their men in the ranks. Absenteeism grew
under them to a monstrous evil, and every poltroon and laggard found
a way of escape. Hence the frequent phenomenon that regiments, which
on the books of the commissary appeared as consumers of 500 or 1000
rations, were reported as carrying into action 250 or 300 bayonets."*
(* Dabney volume 2 pages 18 and 19.) It is unlikely that this picture
is over-coloured, and it is certainly no reproach to the Virginia
soldiers that their discipline was indifferent. There had not yet
been time to transform a multitude of raw recruits into the semblance
of a regular army. Competent instructors and trained leaders were few
in the extreme, and the work had to be left in inexperienced hands.
One Stonewall Jackson was insufficient to leaven a division of 5000
men.

In the second place, Jackson probably remembered that the Stonewall
Brigade at Bull Run, dashing out with the bayonet on the advancing
Federals, had driven them back on their reserves. It seems hardly
probable, had Garnett at Kernstown held his ground a little longer,
that the three regiments still intact could have turned the tide of
battle. But it is not impossible. The Federals had been roughly
handled. Their losses had been heavier than those of the
Confederates. A resolute counterstroke has before now changed the
face of battle, and among unseasoned soldiers panic spreads with
extraordinary effect. So far as can be gathered from the reports,
there is no reason to suspect that the vigour of the Federal
battalions was as yet relaxed. But no one who was not actually
present can presume to judge of the temper of the troops. In every
well-contested battle there comes a moment when the combatants on
both sides become exhausted, and the general who at that moment finds
it in his heart to make one more effort will generally succeed. Such
was the experience of Grant, Virginia's stoutest enemy.* (* Grant's
Memoirs.) That moment, perhaps, had come at Kernstown; and Jackson,
than whom not Skobeleff himself had clearer vision or cooler brain in
the tumult of battle, may have observed it. It cannot be too often
repeated that numbers go for little on the battle-field. It is
possible that Jackson had in his mind, when he declared that the
victory might yet have been won, the decisive counterstroke at
Marengo, where 20,000 Austrians, pressing forward in pursuit of a
defeated enemy, were utterly overthrown by a fresh divis