TOPICS OF THE DAY.
GENERAL SHERMA.N'S MARCH. THE details of the American war do not often excite the imagination. The vast extent of territory over which the conflict is spread, the length of time it has lasted, the absence of any commanding genius on either side, the failure of both armies ever to follow up success, and the snippety style of American reporting, often eloquent and honest, but always incomplete, all tend to diminish the interest of even the most striking events, and little incidents it has been almost impossible to follow. Military men, we believe, affirm that there never was a war which taught soldiers so much, but to the public there has seemed something essentially and strangely undramatic in the whole course of the war. At last, however, we have an episode calculated to make men who are not Americans draw their breath. There has scarcely occurred in modern warfare an incident more exciting, more replete with the elements of true interest, surprise, suspense, and magnitude of possible result than the march of General Sherman from Atlanta to the East Coast. That able officer, the only one of the Northern side who has yet kept a great army in movement over a long period of time without suffering a reverse' has actually undertaken, without a line of communications, to carry an army of 50,000 men 350 miles through a country tropical in all essential characteristics, in- habited by an organized people of the same race as his own sol- diers, and pledged, as all men believe, to resistance to the death. He plunges, as it were, into space, and space filled with threatening appearances, projects his army like a shell over a continent, resolved only that, after a march as long as from Edinburgh to London, or, to use a better illustration, from Benares to Calcutta, he will come out victorious at the other end. The difficulties in the way of such an enterprise are almost indescribable. General Sherman has first of all to keep 50,000 men in incessant movement for at least thirty days, overthrowing or evading whatever may cross his path, and this in a semi-tropical land, where every undulation is a hill, every copse a forest, every sun-crack a ravine. He has during all that space of time to keep them fed, for though he can carry biscuit and coffee, and that not easily, the biscuit required alone amounting to 1,500,000 lbs., or 1,500 cart- loads, he can carry nothing else, and if he attempts to keep American soldiers on bread and coffee alone his camp will very soon ben hospital, and his men useful only when the prospect of actual battle gives them unnatural strength. Then he has to carry his sick, in itself a most per- plexing problem. In a march like this, besides the ordinary sickness incidental to a town with a population of 50,000, besides all the men struck down by fever and dysentery and the accidents inseparable from vast crowds of men and beasts and carts in simultaneous movement; every footsore soldier is a sick soldier, and whatever his rate of progress —and he must move quickly—men will be dropping out at every mile. They cannot be left behind even if the General were the man to leave them, for the practice demoralizes the soldiery, makes them dread every exertion which may entail a few hours' illness, every risk which may bring a wound. There is nothing for it but to carry them, and in so tremendous a march they wilt be among the most serious and embarrass- ing of impedimenta. Then there is the ammunition, not only to be carried but to be spared, for he can get no more till he reaches the sea, and powder and bullets must be served out as if they were made of gold, the severest teat that can be applied to the discipline of an army. If the men once sus- pect there is deficiency there is an end of order, for though individuals might be trusted, no body. of men without powder will advance on enemies with it. Finally, he has, while ad- vancing through an enemy's country and irritating its people by the organized plunder necessary to feed his men, to secure rapid, minute, and trustworthy information, without which his soldiers must be for thirty days permanently on the alert, i. e., driven wild with fatigue, excitement, and want of, rest.
Only a singular combination of circumstances could make such an enterprise a hopeful or even a possible one, and such a combination we are inclined to believe exists. General Sherman is in the first place in command of the best army the North has as yet produced, the only one which can be said to have had long experience in fighting and marching at the same time, the only one which can be relied on to move, as regular troops sometimes will, on restricted rations supplied by chance. His force has been collected for nearly a year, during the whole of which time it has been accustomed to act together, has been incessantly "on service," and has learnt to understand its General's qualifications and its own power. The mere fact that General Sherman could make the attempt at all, could plunge into the wilds without supplies, could require his soldiers to give up tents and feed on bread alone, is clear proof of his ascendancy and their obedience. His march, moreover, is through a semi-tropical region, e., a region "sparsely" settled, in which population is aggregated in small villages placed at long intervals, in which there are no great cities, and over which the dollection of armies is a very diffi- cult and exceedingly tardy process. These circumstances, moreover, though they make the collection of food more tardy, render it also more easy, the isolation of each knot of people making resistance almost hopeless. If indeed he burns all he does not want, he may by driving men to despair provoke the despairing resort Beauregard calls on them to employ,— the removal, namely, of all cattle, all crops, and all sources of- food into the hills, whence they cannot be extracted without too much loss of time. We cannot, however, believe that General Sherman has sanctioned a policy so fatal not to the Confederates, but to the discipline of his own army. The man is a soldier, and an able one, and no able soldier ever yet permitted troops whom he could pay to obtain a taste for unlimited licence and destruction. He might as well reduce them to a mob at once. The loss of barns and houses over a route thirty miles broad cannot cripple a State like Georgia, and it can and will send every white man into the field as an irreconcilable and most dangerous guerilla, while the practice- invariably throws the army which commences it "out of hand." It has already ruined the guerilla cavalry of the South. His own order directs destruction only when "bush whackers" assail his army, and it is his subordinates' in- terpretation of his order which will work or prevent the mischief. The negroes of course he 'will gather up as he would any other allies, and it is in the existence of this. class that the prospect of success in his daring expedition chiefly lies. The peasantry of the country, the actual workers and tillers, are, on the whole, on the invaders' side, and if not irritated by an insane destruction of their subsistence as well as their masters', will supply all defi- ciencies. There are no beasts of burden like willing men. They can carry the sick, drive on the cattle, keep the camps clean, 1. e., healthy, and bring in the only vital information, the neighbourhood of cavalry, while the dread of their senti- ments spreads through the white inhabitants that sense of the absence of unanimity which is so fatal to a despairing defence. Moving through a vast half-populated, but fertile region, in which there are no centres and one-half the population is favourable to the invader, General Sherman unless resisted by armies has in fact nothing to overcome, except the natural difficulties of distance, which cannot be altered, of the rivers, which are few, and of the climate, which he is encountering at the best season of the year.
But will he not be arrested by armies ? The question is one hard to answer in this country, but comparing carefully the facts before the, world we, on the whole, think be will not be. Where is the army to come from ? General Sherman before he quitted Atlanta had most adroitly suffered General Hood to begin a fool's dance towards Tennessee, which renders it impossible for that officer to turn on his track without exposing his rear to General Thomas, who at present is leading him further and further away. Hood may possibly by a series of successes retake Tennessee, though we doubt it, he having only 60,000 men "in his department," 1. e., in three States two armies and four or five garrisons; but that will not hinder General Sherman's march any more than the seizure of Portugal would have stopped Wellington's advance on Toulouse. As for General Beauregard's procla- mations about coming assistance, he is simply whistling like a boy in the dark to keep his courage up. His men cannot travel in balloons, and without them how is he to march from Corinth to Clinton, three hundred and twenty miles in an air line, in time to catch up a force pressing forward at fifteen miles a day? Southward there is no force strong enough to arrest him even if Mobile were abandoned, and northward there is only General Lee. That excellent officer might possibly, by using the single railway left at his disposal, despatch an army in time to intercept the invader before he reaches the sea, but he must risk Richmond to do it, and then be only in a position to fight a battle on tolerably equal terms. The militia have been ordered out from four States, but then an American State is as large as a kingdom, and an army of militiamen has to be collected by tens and twenties over tha surface, supplied with ammunition, supplied with arti lery, supplied with carriage, at all events for its she in time to arrest an invader who all the while is lessly moving along the chord of the circle. If it is done then the Confederates have facilities and capacity for guerilla war such as may make this struggle interminable, but the balance of probabilities is heavily against its being done. The only real danger, as it seems to us, is one on which no man except a Southerner born in Georgia can give a sound opinion. If there is any forest which General Sherman must traverse, any pass he must thread, any stream not to be crossed by pontoons, then a levie en mane may delay him as Dumouriez delayed the Prussian advance, until a regular army can be gathered together or the want of sup- plies disorganizes the invaders. This is possible, and as General Sherman approaches the sea coast, where the Con- federates are still in possession of great cities, is even likely, but short of this the brilliant design may succeed completely, and its success will be the greatest blow of the war. Not only will it reveal, as General Grant is reported to have said, "the hollowness" of the South, i. e., the concentration of force towards the outer rim of the Confederation, but it -divides the territory in two. The road once shown to be passable can be occupied, and a belt of armies placed between Virginia and North Carolina and the rest of the 'Federation. Moreover, at whichever point General Sherman may resolve to strike the sea, he must inflict a most damaging blow on the actual strength of the Confederates. Our own impression, judging by what is known of his march and by the American character, is that his road is towards Augusta, where he will seize the great store of cotton, and thence, led by the passionate feeling of the North against that particular city as much as by military reasons, he will strike a rapid blow at Charleston, the very heart and mainspring of the Southern cause. In any case, whether he marches on that city or Savannah, he attacks it from its weak or land side, and with the assistance of the fleet recently and strongly reinforced. That fleet has been hitherto successfully resisted, but only because no means of making the double attack have as yet been available. With Charleston or Savannah taken, the South loses one more city, one more centre of supplies, one more cause for the confidence which supports her people. Her territory will have been traversed by an invading army from west to east, her noblest State will be threatened with a formidable invasion from south as well as north, and her whole power may, if the success is followed up, be cut in two. On the other hand, if General Sherman is defeated the North loses her finest army and one -of her most efficient generals, but her territory, her people, and her resources remain absolutely intact. The risk in any view is a fearful one, but it is by the successful running of such risks that great campaigns are won and great generals -extort from the world unwilling recognition. There is not a general now alive in Europe who, if Sherman succeeds, will not recognize the addition of one more name to the short list of first-class leaders of armies.
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