another that he is advancing. What are the probabilities? A thousand
questions arise which must be answered. The prospect of success must be
carefully calculated. Human life must be thrown remorselessly into the
scale. All the sorrows and the tears of wives, mothers, fathers,
brothers, and sisters far away, who will mourn for the dead, must be
forgotten. He must shut up all tender thoughts, and become an iron man.
Ah! it is not so fine a thing to be a general, perhaps, as you have
imagined!

It is an incomplete, imperfect, and unsatisfactory look which you have
taken of the machinery of a great army. But you can see that a very
small thing may upset the best-laid plan of any commander. The cowardice
of a regiment, the failure of an officer to do his duty, to be at a
place at an appointed moment, the miscarriage of orders, a hundred
things which you can think of, may turn a victory into a defeat. You can
see that a great battle must be a grand and terrible affair; but though
you may use all your powers of imagination in endeavoring to picture the
positions of the troops,--how they look, how they act, how they stand
amid the terrible storm, braying death, how they rush into the thickest
fire, how they fall like the sere leaves of autumn,--you will fail in
your conceptions of the conflict. You must see it, and be in it, to know
what it is.

CHAPTER III.

THE BATTLE OF BULL RUN.

The first great battle of the war was fought near Bull Run, in Virginia.
There had been skirmishing along the Potomac, in Western Virginia, and
Missouri; but upon the banks of this winding stream was fought a battle
which will be forever memorable. The Rebels call it the battle of
Manassas. It has been called also the battle of Stone Bridge and the
battle of Warrenton Road.

Bull Run is a lazy, sluggish stream, a branch of the Occoquan River,
which empties into the Potomac. It rises among the Bull Run Mountains,
and flows southeast through Fairfax County. Just beyond the stream, as
you go west from Washington, are the plains of Manassas,--level lands,
which years ago waved with corn and tobacco, but the fields long since
were worn out by the thriftless farming of the slaveholders, and now
they are overgrown with thickets of pine and oak.

Two railroads meet upon the plains, one running northwest through the
mountain gaps into the valley of the Shenandoah, and the other running
from Alexandria to Richmond, Culpepper, and the Southwest