se confounded. "The march," says Sherman, who commanded a brigade,
"demonstrated little save the general laxity of discipline; for,
with all my personal efforts, I could not prevent the men from
straggling for water, blackberries, or anything on the way they
fancied." In the whole of the first long summer's day, the sixteenth
of July, the army only marched six miles; and it took the better
part of the seventeenth to herd its stragglers back again. "I wished
them," says McDowell, "to go to Centreville the second day [only
another six miles out] but the men were foot-weary, not so much
by the distance marched as by the time they had been on foot."
That observant private, Warren Lee Goss, has told us how hard it
is to soldier suddenly. "My canteen banged against my bayonet; both
tin cup and bayonet badly interfered with the butt of my musket,
while my cartridge-box and haversack were constantly flopping up
and down--the whole jangling like loose harness and chains on a
runaway horse." The weather was hot. The roads were dusty. And
many a man threw away parts of his kit for which he suffered later
on. There was food in superabundance. But, with that unwieldy and
grossly undisciplined supply-and-transport service, the men and
their food never came together at the proper time.

Early on the eighteenth McDowell, whose own work was excellent
all through, pushed forward a brigade against Blackburn's Ford,
toward the Confederate right, in order to distract attention from
the real objective, which was to be the turning of the left. The
Confederate outposts fell back beyond the ford. The Federal brigade
followed on; when suddenly sharp volleys took it in front and flank.
The opposing brigade, under Longstreet (of whom we shall often
hear again), had lain concealed and sprung its trap quite neatly.
Most of the Federals behaved extremely well under these untoward
circumstances. But one whole battery and another whole battalion,
whose term of service expired that afternoon, were officially reported
as having "moved to the rear to the sound of the enemy's cannon."
Thereafter, as military units, they simply ceased to exist.

At one o'clock in the morning of this same day Johnston received
a telegram at Winchester, from Richmond, warning him that McDowell
was advancing on Bull Run, with the evident intention of seizing
Manassas Junction, which would cut the Confederate rail communication
with the Shenandoah Valley and so prevent all ch