ostly attack on the immensely strengthened Landing.

That night the rain came down in torrents; and the Confederates
sought shelter in the tents the Federals had abandoned. They found
little rest there, being harassed all through the bleak dark by
the big shells that the gunboats threw among them.

At dawn Grant, now reinforced by twenty-five thousand fresh men under
Buell and Lew Wallace, took the offensive. Beauregard, hopelessly
outnumbered and without a single fresh man, retired on Corinth,
magnificently covered by Bragg's rearguard, which held the Federals
back for hours near the crucial point of Shiloh Church.

Shiloh was the fiercest battle ever fought in the River War. The
losses were over ten thousand a side in killed and wounded; while a
thousand Confederates and three thousand Federals were captured. It
was a Confederate failure; but hardly the kind of victory the Federals
needed just then, before the consummate triumph of Farragut at New
Orleans. It brought together Federal forces that the Confederates
could not possibly withstand, even on their new line east from Memphis.
But it did not raise the Federal, or depress the Confederate, morale.

Four days after the battle Halleck arrived at Pittsburg Landing
and took command of the combined armies. He was soon reinforced
by Pope; whereupon he divided the whole into right and left wings,
center, and reserve, each under its own commander. Grant was made
second in command of the whole. But, as Halleck dealt directly
with his other immediate subordinates, Grant simply became the
fifth wheel of the Halleckian slow-coach, which, after twenty days
of preparation, began, with most elaborate precautions, its crawl
toward Corinth.

Grant's position became so nearly unbearable that he applied more
than once for transfer to some other place. But this was refused.
So he strove to do his impossible duty till the middle of July,
when his punishment for Shiloh was completed by his promotion to
command a depleted remnant of Halleck's Grand Army. It is not by
any means the least of Grant's claims to real greatness that, as
a leader, he was able to survive his most searching trials: the
surprise at Shiloh, the misunderstandings and arrest that followed
Shiloh, the slur of being made a fifth-wheel second-in-command,
the demoralizing strain of that "most anxious period of the war"
when his depleted forces were thrown back on the defensive, and
the eight discouraging months