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ter's lieutenant of Revolutionary story, was soon disrespectfully, if not abbreviated, at least changed, into " Horrid Rebels," which the com- pany bore with great complacency until it became company F. For, with a complete disregard of all the heroic pledges which had been made for the immortalization of these company names, they were in due course ignored by the War Department, and the companies after all had each to tight merely as company A, B or C of such a regi- ment.
Foreign officers who visited our army, and military critics who have written of its achievements, unite in condemning its discipline, but I have always thought this fault was greatly exaggerated.
Colonel Chesney, in his memoirs from which I have already quoted, panegyrizing our great commander, asks : " What wonder, then, if he thenceforward commanded an army from which his parting wrung tears more bitter than any the fall of their cause could extort; an army which followed him, after three years of glorious vicissitudes, into private life without one thought of further resistance against the fate to which their adored chief yielded without a murmur?" But he asks again : " Is it therefore asserted that Lee, as a commander, was faultless? Far from it. We say with all humility," he adds, " but without any doubt, that from first to last he committed most grave errors; errors which only his other high qualities prevented from being fatal to his reputation. Chief of these," he says, "was his permitting the continuance of the laxity of discipline which throughout the war clogged the movements of the Confederates and robbed their most brilliant victories of their reward. The fatal habit of straggling from the ranks on the least pretext; the hardly less fatal habit of allowing each man to load himself with any superfluous arms or clothes he chose to carry; the general want of subordina- tion to trifling orders, which was the inheritance of their volunteer origin; these evils Lee found in full existence when he took com- mand before Richmond, and he never strove to check them."
Colonel Chesiiey says : " As the war went on the rifts caused by indiscipline and carelessness in the Confederate armies widened more and more, and in the end these faults were hardly less fatal to the fortunes of the South than the greater material resources of her adversary. Her fall," he continues, "was a new proof to the world that neither personal courage nor heroic leadership can any more supply the place of discipline to a national force than can untrained patriotism or vaunts of past glories."
After reading this distinguished officer's memoirs of Lee and Grant,
