ight that had not learned how to be beaten and how to run?
The English ran ninety miles from Bannockburn, seared by the "gillies"
and the baggage-wagons. They paid back their debt at Culloden. The
Prussian armies were routed at Jena and Auerstaedt. They had their
revenge in the "_sauve qui peut_" of Waterloo. The great armada, British
and French, undertook to bombard Sebastopol, and eight ships of the line
were so mauled that they had to go back to Toulon and Portsmouth for
repairs. Lord Raglan is said to have so far despaired of success as to
have contemplated raising the siege.

Everybody remembers the feeling produced by the repeated fruitless
attacks on the fortifications, the three unsuccessful bombardments,
the divided counsels, the disappointment and death of Lord Raglan, the
complaints of Canrobert of the want of a single commanding intellect,
and the relinquishment of his own position to Pelissier, itself a
confession of failure. If there ever was a campaign begun with defeat
and disaster, it was that which ended with the fall of Sebastopol.

Read the account of the retreat of the advanced force of our own army
at the Battle of Monmouth Court-House. Washington could not believe the
first story told him. Presently he met one fugitive after another, and
then Grayson's and Patton's regiments in disorderly retreat. He did not
know what to make of it. There had been no fighting except a successful
skirmish with the enemy's cavalry. He met Major Howard; this officer
could give no reason for the running,--had never seen the like. Another
officer swears they are flying from a shadow. Lee tries to account for
it,--troops confused by contradictory intelligence, by disobedience of
orders, by the meddling and blundering of individuals,--vague excuses
all, the plain truth being that they had given way to a panic. But for
Washington's fierce commands and threats, the retreat might have become
a total rout.

It is curious to see how the little incidents, even, of our late
accelerated retrograde movement recall those of the old Revolutionary
story. Mr. Russell speaks thus of the fugitives: "Faces black and dusty,
_tongues out in the heat_, eyes staring,--it was a most wonderful
sight." If Mr. Russell had ever read Stedman's account of his own
countrymen's twenty-mile run from Concord to Bunker's Hill, he would
have learned that they "were so much exhausted with fatigue, that they
were obliged to lie down for rest on the grou