[CHAPTER XXII]
[BENEATH THE SKIN]
John Vaughan saw the blow fall on McClellan's magnificent headquarters in deep amazement. The idol of the army was ordered to turn over his command to General Burnside and the impossible had happened.
Instead of the brilliant coup d'état which he and the entire staff had predicted, the fallen leader obeyed and took an affectionate leave of his men.
McClellan knew, what his staff could not understand, that for the moment the President was master of the situation. He still held the unbounded confidence of his officers, but the rank and file of his soldiers had become his wondering critics. They believed they had crushed Lee's army at Antietam and yet they lay idle until the skillful Southern Commander had crossed the Potomac, made good his retreat, and once more insulted them by riding around their entire lines. The volunteer American soldier was a good fighter and a good critic of the men who led him. He had his own ideas about how an army should be fought and maneuvered. As the idol of fighting men, McClellan had ceased to threaten the supremacy of the civil law. There was no attempt at the long looked for coup d'état. It was too late. No one knew this more clearly than McClellan himself.
But his fall was the bitterness of death to the staff who adored him and the generals who believed in him. Burnside, knowing the condition of practical anarchy he must face, declined the command. The President forced him to accept. He took it reluctantly with grim forebodings of failure.
John received his long leave of absence from his Chief and left for Washington the night before the formal farewell. His rage against the bungler who ruled the Nation with autocratic power was fierce and implacable.
His resentment against the woman he loved was scarcely less bitter. It was her triumph, too. She believed in the divine inspiration of the man who sat in the chair of Washington and Jefferson. Great God, could madness reach sublimer folly! She had written him a letter of good wishes and all but asked for a reconciliation before the battle. Love had fought with pride through a night and pride had won. He hadn't answered the letter.
He avoided his newspaper friends and plunged into a round of dissipation. Beneath the grim tragedy of blood in Washington flowed the ever widening and deepening torrent of sensual revelry—of wine and women, song and dance, gambling and intrigue.