this time it was worse; the
whole Union Army was on the verge of rout. Grant, hobbling on crutches
from a recent leg injury, met the mob of panic-stricken stragglers as
he left the boat at Pittsburgh Landing. Calling on them to turn back,
he mounted and rode toward the battle, shouting encouragement and
giving orders to all he met. Confidence flowed from him back into an
already beaten Army and in this way a field near lost was soon
regained.

The last and best picture of Grant is on the evening after he had
taken his first beating from General Lee in the campaign against
Richmond. He was newly with the Army of the Potomac. His predecessors,
after being whipped by Lee, had invariably retreated to safe distance.
But this time as the defeated army took the road of retreat out of the
Wilderness, its columns got only as far as the Chancellorsville House
crossroad. There the soldiers saw a squat, bearded man, sitting
horseback, and drawing on a cigar. As the head of each regiment came
abreast him, he silently motioned it to take the right-hand fork--back
toward Lee's flank and deeper than ever into the Wilderness. That
night for the first time the Army sensed an electric change in the air
over Virginia. It had a man.

"I intend to fight it out on this line" is more revealing of the one
supreme quality which put the seal on all other of U. S. Grant's great
gifts for military leading than everything else that the historians
have written of him. He was the epitome of that spirit which moderns
call "seeing the show through." He was sensitive to a fault in his
early years, and carried to his tomb a dislike for military uniform,
caused by his being made the butt of ridicule the first time he ever
donned a soldier suit. As a junior lieutenant in the Mexican War, he
sensed no particular aptitude in himself. But he had participated in
every engagement possible to a member of his regiment, and had
executed every small duty to the hilt, with particular attention to
conserving the lives of his men. This was the school and the course
which later enabled him to march to Richmond, when men's lives had to
be spent for the good of the Nation. In more recent times, one of the
great statesmen and soldiers of the United States, Henry L. Stimson,
has added his witness to the value of this force in all enterprise: "I
know the withering effect of limited commitments and I know the
regenerative effect of full action." Though he was speaking
part