I did not see that brisk young general
again until last year; then he was wearing white hair and whiskers.
In time I came to know that Union colonel whose coming frightened me out
of the war and crippled the Southern cause to that extent--General Grant.
I came within a few hours of seeing him when he was as unknown as I was
myself; at a time when anybody could have said, 'Grant?--Ulysses S.
Grant? I do not remember hearing the name before.' It seems difficult
to realise that there was once a time when such a remark could be
rationally made; but there was, and I was within a few miles of the place
and the occasion too, though proceeding in the other direction.
The thoughtful will not throw this war-paper of mine lightly aside as
being valueless. It has this value: it is a not unfair picture of what
went on in many and many a militia camp in the first months of the
rebellion, when the green recruits were without discipline, without the
steadying and heartening influence or trained leaders; when all their
circumstances were new and strange, and charged with exaggerated terrors,
and before the invaluable experience of actual collision in the field had
turned them from rabbits into soldiers.
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