g him on his line of retreat. Capturing
such a force, or, as the phrase then went, "bagging it," is easier
talked of than done; but it is quite probable that it might have
been so scattered and demoralized as to be of little further value
as an army, and considerable parts of it might have been taken
prisoners.

Rosecrans had begun the campaign in August with the announced
purpose of marching to Wytheville and Abingdon in the Holston
valley, and thence into East Tennessee. McClellan had cherished the
idea of making the Kanawha line the base of operations into the same
region; still later Fremont, and after him Halleck did the same.
Looking only at the map, it seemed an easy thing to do; but the
almost wilderness character of the intervening country with its poor
and sparsely scattered people, the weary miles of steep
mountain-roads becoming impassable in rainy weather, and the total
absence of forage for animals, were elements of the problem which
they all ignored or greatly underestimated. It was easy, sitting at
one's office table, to sweep the hand over a few inches of chart
showing next to nothing of the topography, and to say, "We will
march from here to here;" but when the march was undertaken, the
natural obstacles began to assert themselves, and one general after
another had to find apologies for failing to accomplish what ought
never to have been undertaken. After a year or two, the military
advisers of the War Department began to realize how closely the
movements of great bodies of soldiers were tied to rivers and
railways; but they seemed to learn it only as the merest civilian
could learn it, by the experience of repeated failures of plans
based on long lines of communication over forest-clad mountains,
dependent upon wagons to carry everything for man and beast.

Instead of reaching Wytheville or Abingdon, Rosecrans found that he
could not supply his little army even at Big Sewell Mountain; and
except for a few days, he occupied no part of the country in advance
of my positions in August, then held by a single brigade in the
presence of the same enemy. It was not Floyd's army, but the
physical obstacles presented by the country that chained him to
Gauley Bridge. I shall have occasion hereafter to note how the same
ignoring of nature's laws came near starving Burnside's command in
East Tennessee, where the attempt to supply it by wagon trains from
Lexington in Kentucky or from Nashville failed so utterly