nd
to shoulder arms on passing an officer is something to which only
Ethiopia or the regular army can attain. Grant, if you please, (though I
do not grant,) that these are merely points of foolish punctilio. But
there are many things which are more than punctilio, though they may be
less than fighting. The efficiency of a body of troops depends, after
all, not so much on its bravery as on the condition of its sick-list. A
regiment which does picket-duty faithfully will often avoid the need of
duties more terrible. Yet I have ridden by night along a chain of ten
sentinels, every one of whom should have taken my life rather than
permit me to give the countersign without dismounting, and have been
required to dismount by only four, while two did not ask me for the
countersign at all, and two others were asleep. I have ridden through a
regimental camp whose utterly filthy condition seemed enough to send
malaria through a whole military department, and have been asked by the
colonel, almost with tears in his eyes, to explain to him why his men
were dying at the rate of one a day. The latter was a regiment nearly a
year old, and the former one of almost two years' service, and just from
the old Army of the Potomac.

The fault was, of course, in the officers. The officer makes the
command, as surely as, in educational matters, the teacher makes the
school. There is not a regiment in the army so good that it could not be
utterly spoiled in three months by a poor commander, nor so poor that it
could not be altogether transformed in six by a good one. The difference
in material is nothing,--white or black, German or Irish; so potent is
military machinery that an officer who knows his business can make good
soldiers out of almost anything, give him but a fair chance. The
difference between the present Army of the Potomac and any previous
one,--the reason why we do not daily hear, as in the early campaigns, of
irresistible surprises, overwhelming numbers, and masked batteries,--the
reason why the present movements are a tide and not a wave,--is not that
the men are veterans, but that the officers are. There is an immense
amount of perfectly raw material in General Grant's force, besides the
colored regiments, which in that army are all raw, but in which the
Copperhead critics have such faith they would gladly select them for
dangers fit for Napoleon's Old Guard. But the newest recruit soon grows
steady with a steady corporal at his