TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE BATTLES IN -VIRGINIA.
WITH every fresh year of battle the incidents of the American struggle grow only more gigantic. The strength of the combatants develops with exercise instead of diminishing from exhaustion, and in the fourth year of the war they are striking heavier and better aimed blows than in the first campaign. The energy exhibited on both sides is astounding, and on some points sets at defiance all the calcu- lations of political foresight. The mode in which we receive the news, and the want of interest felt by Englishmen in in- dividual Americans, blunts us all a little to the true import of events, but since Borodino there has been no such battle as that which, from the 5th to the 13th May, eight consecutive days, has been fought out in Northern Virginia. How the armies on either side endured the inevitable fatigue of so pro- tracted a contest is almost inconceivable. One day of severe fighting leaves most soldiers, partly from actual work, but chiefly from the strain on the nervous system, almost incapable of active exertion, and quite incapable of initiating new and equal efforts. Yet for eight consecutive days General Grant, with an army which was not reinforced meanwhile from with- out, gave and accepted battle, now pouring his regiments straight on Lee's position, now awaiting the charge of the hur- rahing Southerners, now shifting his position to meet an attack intended to strike him in flank, and then pitching his regi- ments among the trees as if they had been mere detonating shells. It is true that he employed his force as if he had two armies, using the two wings as if they were guard and reserve guard, and so perhaps enabled each wing partially to recruit itself; but then the nature of the ground must be taken into account. Each of these eight battles was in truth a grand skirmish, in which artillery was of very limited use, and the heavy work fell on the men, who by thousands found them- selves engaged with other thousands in a hand-to-hand conflict amidst the brushwood and trees. It was a conflict of scores of thousands in the bush, perhaps the most exhaust- ing of all conceivable modes of fighting, because the one which most requires individual energy, and it went on for eight days. The final result, setting aside the rumours which imply a complete Northern victory, we take to have been this :—Both sides fought hand to hand, the car- .. nage on both sides was enormous, and both armies were used with a visibly equal skill ; but as the days drew on the stubborn valour of the North began to tell on the vehement courage of the South, exertion wore out the more fiery and worse fed army first, a division of Southerners, probably worn out with fatigue, surrendered, and General Lee fell back in good order to his next position. The losses on either side are probably not overrated at 40,000 men, for men in a contest like this drop unwounded like over-driven sheep, but the substantial result, the ground, and the power of com- mencing instead of enduring the next attack, remains with the Northern leader. There is no need of entering into those topographical disquisitions, most of them wrong, and all of them unintelligible without a map, in which our contempo- raries indulge, for the great facts are not denied. Whether Spotsylvania were a good or bad position, whether Hancock at- tacked in flank or front, General Lee is not defeated in the sense in which people who have never read history understand defeat, that is, his army has neither been destroyed, nor "driven in headlong rout," nor suffered any other poetical form of annihilation. But he, knowing the country perfectly, being thoroughly obeyedby his army, and fighting a defensive campaign, hasbeen driven frompointto point fornearly twenty milestowards the city which he intended the invaders should not reach. That is not ruin, but if it is not defeat what do defeat and victory mean ? General Grant is not in Richmond, but he has driven the defenders of Richmond back towards the city, and has at all events the power of choice whether to follow up his blows or not. General Lee has not that power. He must sustain successive assaults at General Grant's discretion, or retreat, that is, give up the object for which he has sacrificed so much—the defence of the road to the capital of the Con- federate States. There is in reckoning up a struggle like this no room, as it seem to us, for party or political feeling. The man who depreciates General Lee and the army under his command, which for eight days, with inferior commissariat, inferior men, and it may be inferior numbers, made such a con- flict doubtful, does not comprehend the first conditions of hero- ism; but then the man who asserts that Lee was not defeated, that he "changed his position" without compulsion, does not understand much of war. It is possible of course that General Grant may be too exhausted to renew the attack as incessantly as Lee's remaining strength still appears to demand, but it is very improbable. The road behind him is clear. There are 30,000 men in the lines of Washington, there are unbroken railways from Washington to the Canadian frontier and the West, and if the Government does its duty a fresh unbroken corps d'armie of at least thirty thousand men ought three days after the last engagement to have been at General Grant's disposal. He can after his next engagement summon the army in the Shenandoah Valley, troops must be hurrying up from every corner of the States, and he ought, after winning the next attack and suffering terrible loss, to be still in comthand of ninety thousand men for the final advance.
This, however, is speculation, and there are fewer data for speculation in this American campaign than there have perhaps ever been in any struggle of equal magnitude. The great facts of the contest appear to be these :—The North has discovered and placed in supreme command a general who is competent to his task, a man who whether or not a great strategist or great organizer, can give the most effective use to the special qualities of the force under his command. It is a democratic force, very numerous, very defective in what Europe understands by discipline, very eager in the cause, very impatient of inaction, and very indifferent to losses reckoned in mere totals of men. It is an American force, one-half of its rank and file and three-fourths of its non- commissioned and commissioned officers being native-born. Americans, i. e., a force stubbornly brave, enduring beyond the ordinary precedent of soldiery, but over-conceited, over- anxious about its comforts, and liable to almost hysteric panics. General Grant uses all those qualities, fights as revolutionary generals should fight, as the first generals of the French Convention fought, makes numbers, and gallantry, and ardour do duty for discipline, allows no period of in- action, takes the position ho wants if it costs a man for- every tree, and when a division is destroyed hurls another- into its place and still further upcn the road. " Conquerors, conquered or banged, forward we must," is the true motto of a democratic army, and General Grant alone among the soldiers whom the Republic has yet produced,—except M'Clollan during the three days of his fight in the Peninsula— has acted upon the truth. He hurls his men on the obstacle ; if they take it, well; if not, another division renews the effort ; if that is also driven back the army does not defend itself, but attacks the attackers ; if rumours come in announcing total rout the General "does not believe a word of it," but sends up his next reserve. His mode of fighting, it may be said, is mere pommelling, Lord Gough's strategy, but we ask candid men have English generals,—and Grant is as English in all but habitat as Wellington,—ever succeeded in employing any other? Get him close to his foes and the Anglo- Saxon wins, and strategy when all is said is only the science of winning. It is exhaustive ? One month's immigration will repair all the losses of Spotsylvania. It is bloody ? Would disease kill fewer if the delay were scientific ? It is immoral ? It is yet to be proved that the guilt of slaughter depends on the number of the slaughtered, or that the battle which is " heroic " if a thousand are slain is "an offering ta Moloch" if ten thousand fall. The swiftest war is the most merciful war, and with the means at his disposal, means as limitless in quantity as they are deficient in quality, General Grant is, we believe, securing the swiftest war. Fifty thou- sand regular soldiers, each disciplined into a machine and trained into a ready-witted artillerist, would be a less costly, a less bloody, and a more efficient weapon ; but then where is that weapon to be obtained by General Grant ? Contending with a general who is perhaps his superior in brain, who commands an army inured to victory, who was fighting round his own hearth in a country of which he knew every step, General Grant, with only equal numbers, leading men who have failed in three invasions, and fighting upon soil which he must have learned from maps, has of the two men won the game. The North has obtained a leader who wins, at whose bidding soldiers will charge again and again and again for eight consecutive days, and that success is by itself an advantage greater than a successful campaign. The other point is the increased rather than the diminished vigour of the sresisting power. The Southern cause is to us detestable, but no man who can feel can refuse high admiration to the heroic energy which these slaveholders have displayed. Had the Danes shown half their fervour the Prussians would be sleeping in Schleswig. The leaders of the South,—these men who are warring for their freedom,- and define that freedom as the right to whip all darker than themselves,—have performed a feat we believe without a parallel in modern history, or paralleled only during the second campaign of the Convention, have enticed or driven the whole arm-bearing population into the field. With two States at least grievously discontented, with four more occupied by the enemy, with three millions of slaves still to watch, with every port still blockaded, with pro- visions at famine prices, and luxuries unknown, without an ally on earth, and with three years of incessant battle waged by a population that is not recruited by immigration, they are now in the fourth year of the war waging an equal battle with a nation double their own in number, which has six timaa their wealth, which commands the sea, and which re- gains every day from abroad its daily loss in the hospitals and the field. While facing in Virginia a general who urges on a hundred thousand men to eight days of consecutive battle, the Southern leaders keep up the contest in Tennessee, and at the other extremity of their territory have attacked General Banks in such force, and with such success, that the Federals may yet lose their hold on Louis- iana. There appears, too, as yet no reason for assuming a limit to these displays of energy. Men in the South ought to be becoming fewer, but there is no proof of the fact, no visible evidence of exhaustion, or weariness, or change of the original purpose. Indeed it seems doubtful whether three years of battle have not increased the Southern strength by annealing it, have not beaten the pulpy mass into hard con- sistency, changed States which were indifferent into warlike communities, classes which were lukewarm into fanatics, a group of revolted republics into a homogeneous nation. If this should be the case, the utmost the North can hope for is to dictate its own terms; and even to dictate its own terms it is well that it has discovered a general whose genius is in accord with that of the men he has to lead, and the circum- stances with which he has to deal.
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