Page:History of the Fenian raid on Fort Erie with an account of the Battle of Ridgeway.djvu/33

 likely to march towards Chippawa; and that their force was between 1000 and 1500 and likely to be reinforced before morning.

Colonel Peacock, although an officer who had never seen service in the field, is nevertheless a thoroughly educated military man, having obtained with the highest honors a first-class certificate in the senior class at the great Military College at Sandhurst. He is a strict disciplinarian, active, intelligent, and vigilant, cool, and calculating; and although a man of undoubted pluck, is nevertheless too good a soldier to risk the loss of his command for the sake of winning the doubtful reputation of bravery by a reckless carelessness in the management of his men.

Being, as I have said, a thoroughly educated military man, and of a decided military talent, he at once perceived the difficulty and probable danger of attacking on two lines of operations. He had several plans good and bad open to him.

1st. He might have marched by the river road to Fort Erie, and sent Lieut.-Col. Booker by the Grand Trunk Railway and along the River to Frenchman's Creek, and have cut off the Fenians, and attacked them in concert. This was the plan afterwards proposed by Lieut.-Col. Dennis and acceded to by Capt. Akers. This plan could only have originated in an unmilitary mind, and one perfectly ignorant of the military art. The first great principle of war is "always to oppose the mass of your army to fractions of the enemy;" and another great principle, a deduction from the first, is "always to act upon interior lines"—that is to say, upon the inner lines, so that your army may concentrate upon any one point before the enemy can concentrate there. Of course this is but to prevent the application of the first principle against yourself.

Now in this plan both these principles would be violated. Colonel Peacock's force and Lieut.-Col. Booker's would be acting upon exterior lines. The Fenians being between them, or upon the interior lines, by marching towards Chippawa or Port Colborne, could fall upon one column before the other