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fretful, like a dog chained in a barrel—’ceptin’ I don’t howl none. When we get to a hill, I aim to have what Marse Robert calls a breather—we jest light out and go galloping hard up them long hills. ‘Makes you feel real good to beat ‘em—feel ‘em falling away under your hooves, trees going by, dust a-kicking up. S’afternoon, when we was galloping lickety-split, we overtook two fellas riding along, easy-like, gentlemen who live here and help Marse Robert with his commanding. So he pulls me up and gives a howdy to ‘em. “I thought a little run would be good for Traveller,” he says. One of their horses blows out of his nose at me, “Hrrrrmph,” friendly-like, ‘much as to say “A little run, hunh?” I’d like to see
him
try a full gallop up that there hill. Guess he’d soon be hollering ‘nuff.
    Early fall, 1861. A bleak, rolling, precipitous wilderness, disclosing itself in glimpses between drifting rain clouds, stretching northward into an infinity of mist and wooded solitude: the Allegheny Mountains of western Virginia. Between the cliffs and chasms, the desolate uplands are covered not only with virgin forest but also, in many places, with thick undergrowths of laurel, so dense and interlocked as to be almost impenetrable. These are now heavy with water, millions of gallons of rain held in suspension among the branches and foliage, so that anyone trying to push through even a few yards is instantly soaked to the skin. Daily, for weeks past, it has rained; it is still raining. The more open uplands are quagmires in which advancing men sink suddenly to their knees, cursing and calling for help. Every small creek coursing down these westward-facing slopes has covered its rocks, burst its banks. Many are impassable; turbid brown torrents, chattering and growling. From time to time the bleak wind, which stirs but never disperses the low clouds, creeps lower to swirl the mists hanging in the chasms, veiling and half-revealing the sheer drops, intensifying their naturally sinister aspect
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    In this fastness, a terrain where any kind of coordinated movement has become virtually impossible, where both motion and immobility are alike misery, where the few dirt tracks are morasses and a man without a compass can become lost and disoriented within minutes, two tiny armies—each numbering fewer than ten thousand—are engaged upon an almost mutual sequence of blunders, dissensions and suffering that for want of a better term must still be called a campaign. It is to neither’s advantage to move. The side attempting an attack will be defeated; or else, not improbably, never succeed in reaching the enemy at all, as has already happened at Cheat Mountain, in the wilds between Monterey and Huttonsville
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    This place of torment is made of rain. Men breathe the rain, sleep in it, are soaked in it, die in it. Tentless and shelterless, the young farmhands, counter clerks and smallholders’ sons who comprise the disjointed Confederate forces opposed to Cox and Rosecrans stand, sit or lie shivering in the chill air, their original fervor of enlistment leaking away through sodden, rotting boots. A large proportion have gone sick with scurvy, dysentery, pneumonia. A plague of measles has swept through the camps
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    The local people evince no friendliness. The army might as well be in enemy country. Their doings, their every movement are reported to the Federals. General Garnett has been killed in action. Generals Floyd and Wise have been on bad terms, refusing to cooperate with each other, though both have been equally resentful of the command of General Robert E. Lee, appointed by President Davis to reconcile their differences and reorganize the army—such as it is. General Wise has been relieved of his command
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    As the approach of winter makes itself daily more evident, General Lee, who has with difficulty withdrawn southward from