nearly
six months ahead of us in organization and preparation. He did not
conceal his belief that we were likely to find the war a much longer
and more serious piece of business than was commonly expected, and
that unless we pushed hard our drilling and instruction we should
find ourselves at a disadvantage in our earlier encounters. What he
said had a good effect in making officers and men take more
willingly to the laborious routine of the parade ground and the
regimental school; for such opinions as his soon ran through the
camp, and they were commented upon by the enlisted men quite as
earnestly as among the officers. Still, hope kept the upper hand,
and if the question had been put to vote, I believe that
three-fourths of us still cherished the belief that a single
campaign would end the war.

In the organization of my own brigade I had the assistance of
Captain McElroy, a young man who had nearly completed the course at
West Point, and who was subsequently made major of the Twentieth
Ohio. He was sent to the camp by the governor as a drill officer,
and I assigned him to staff duty. For commissary, I detailed
Lieutenant Gibbs, who accompanied one of the regiments from
Cincinnati, and who had seen a good deal of service as clerk in one
of the staff departments of the regular army. I had also for a time
the services of one of the picturesque adventurers who turn up in
such crises. In the Seventh Ohio was a company recruited in
Cleveland, of which the nucleus was an organization of Zouaves,
existing for some time before the war. It was made up of young men
who had been stimulated by the popularity of Ellsworth's Zouaves in
Chicago to form a similar body. They had had as their drill master a
Frenchman named De Villiers. His profession was that of a teacher of
fencing; but he had been an officer in Ellsworth's company, and was
familiar with fancy manoeuvres for street parade, and with a special
skirmish drill and bayonet exercise. Small, swarthy, with angular
features, and a brusque, military manner, in a showy uniform and
jaunty _kepi_ of scarlet cloth, covered with gold lace, he created
quite a sensation among us. His assumption of knowledge and
experience was accepted as true. He claimed to have been a surgeon
in the French army in Algiers, though we afterward learned to doubt
if his rank had been higher than that of a barber-surgeon of a
cavalry troop. From the testimonials he brought with him, I thought
I was d