“But they have improved very greatly, have they not?” asked the President.
“Some of them,” answered the General, “notably the New York, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania troops, are excellent and can go into battle with the regulars at any time. But—” he turned to an artillery officer. “Will you tell the President about yesterday’s field artillery practice?”
What Untrained Batteries Did
“We sent five untrained batteries to an indicated position,” said the officer. “They had practiced only about half a dozen times in the last year, and then they had merely drilled in the motions of handling their pieces, as their armories were equipped neither for mounted drill or sub-caliber practice. When they reached the positions that they were to hold, they had lost the locations of their own side, and within half an hour they were blazing into cover occupied by their own infantry. If they had been using shell instead of blanks—whew!”[136]
“We are only just getting several organizations to learn how to deploy as skirmishers from close order,” said the Commander. “You know how vital that is under fire. Their company commanders appear to have had no previous experience at it, and the corporals let their squads get out of hand hopelessly. There have been some sad mix-ups. The result in battle would have been sickening.”[137]
“But I tell you,” said the President, “the country is wild! The people know that you have the whole of a magnificent railroad system from here to New York at your disposal. They know that the invading army must have been spread out tremendously to hold all the territory that it occupies. They cannot understand why you should not be able to engage the force that is advancing on New York.”
What the Public Did Not Know
The General walked to the wall map. “The enemy is thinned out. Yes!” He laid his finger on the chart. “But to meet him, we must move due south 140 miles down the Hudson Valley, with the river on one side of us and the Berkshire and Litchfield Hills of Massachusetts and Connecticut on the other. We cannot leave men behind us to protect that length of line and hold open our road for us if we have to retreat. When General Sherman marched to Atlanta, he left 115,000 men behind him to guard his 300 mile line back through Chattanooga to Nashville. We have less than fifty thousand men in our whole army, even if we scrape together all the very latest green arrivals.
“The moment we leave our base,” continued the Commander, “the enemy headquarters will know it. They will instantly begin a big shifting of their New England forces. They will push them across into New York State behind us, and we’ll be trapped.”
“You think that they can concentrate swiftly enough?” asked the Secretary of War.