l expected did not occur, none of the
small advantages accruing, now to this side and now to that, in isolated
and accidental collisions being followed up. Half-hearted attacks
provoked a sullen resistance which was satisfied with mere repulse.
Orders were obeyed with mechanical fidelity; no one did any more than
his duty.

"The army is cowardly to-day," said General Cameron, the commander of a
Federal brigade, to his adjutant-general.

"The army is cold," replied the officer addressed, "and--yes, it doesn't
wish to be like that."

He pointed to one of the dead bodies, lying in a thin pool of yellow
water, its face and clothing bespattered with mud from hoof and wheel.

The army's weapons seemed to share its military delinquency. The rattle
of rifles sounded flat and contemptible. It had no meaning and scarcely
roused to attention and expectancy the unengaged parts of the
line-of-battle and the waiting reserves. Heard at a little distance, the
reports of cannon were feeble in volume and _timbre_: they lacked sting
and resonance. The guns seemed to be fired with light charges,
unshotted. And so the futile day wore on to its dreary close, and then
to a night of discomfort succeeded a day of apprehension.

An army has a personality. Beneath the individual thoughts and emotions
of its component parts it thinks and feels as a unit. And in this large,
inclusive sense of things lies a wiser wisdom than the mere sum of all
that it knows. On that dismal morning this great brute force, groping at
the bottom of a white ocean of fog among trees that seemed as sea weeds,
had a dumb consciousness that all was not well; that a day's manoeuvring
had resulted in a faulty disposition of its parts, a blind diffusion of
its strength. The men felt insecure and talked among themselves of such
tactical errors as with their meager military vocabulary they were able
to name. Field and line officers gathered in groups and spoke more
learnedly of what they apprehended with no greater clearness. Commanders
of brigades and divisions looked anxiously to their connections on the
right and on the left, sent staff officers on errands of inquiry and
pushed skirmish lines silently and cautiously forward into the dubious
region between the known and the unknown. At some points on the line the
troops, apparently of their own volition, constructed such defenses as
they could without the silent spade and the noisy ax.

One of these points was held by C