CHAPTER XXV.
THE MILITARY SECRET SERVICE. RETURN FROM A SPYING EXPEDITION.
The Duties of Spies. The Necessity for their Employment. The Status of Spies, and the extraordinary Perils they run. Some Remarks about the Secret Service, and the Necessity for its Improvement. I reach the Federal Lines, and obtain a Pass to go North from General Rosecrans. On my Travels in search of Information. Arrival at Martinsburg, and am put in the Room of a Federal Officer. A Disturbance in the Night. "Who is that Woman?" I make an advantageous Acquaintance. A polite Quartermaster. All about a pretended dead Brother. How Secret Service Agents go about their Work. A Visit to my pretended Brother's Grave, and what I gained by it. I succeed in giving one of Mosby's Pickets an important bit of Information. The polite Attention of Federal Officers. I return to Chatanooga, and resume my Confederate Uniform. A perilous Attempt to reach the Confederate Lines. What a Drink of Whiskey can do. I become Lame in my wounded Foot, and am sent to Atlanta for medical Treatment.
HE position and duties of spies are little understood by persons who have had no actual experience of warfare, and who, consequently, are unable to understand the multitude of agencies it is requisite for the commanders of armies
and the heads of governments, which may find it necessary to make an appeal to arms in order to settle their differences, to resort to for the accomplishment of the
ends they have in view. Just as the quartermaster, the commissary, the paymaster, and the surgeon are as important as the generals, if any fighting worthy of the
name is to be done, and warfare is to be an affair of science and skill, instead of a mere trial of brute force) so the spy, who will be able to obtain information of the movements of the enemy; who will discover the plans for campaigns and battles that are being arranged; who will intercept despatches; who will carry false intelligence to the enemy, and who, when he does become possessed of any fact worth knowing, will
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