Page:Memoirs of Henry Villard, volume 1.djvu/288

 division was from five to six miles away, at and about Cramp's Landing, below Pittsburg. It was not only the intervening distance, but also the broken nature of the ground separating the several camps, that made it impracticable to form quickly a connected defensive line. Still worse, the divisions formed entirely independent military units. In other words, no one division commander had authority over the other commanders. They all had to report to, and receive orders from, General Grant, who remained, as we have seen, at Savannah up to almost noon of the first day of battle—an unpardonable error, fraught, as it proved, with the greatest peril. Yet other faults of omission were chargeable to the Federal side. The approaches from Corinth were not properly guarded. No effort was made to protect the front against a sudden hostile offensive by field defences such as were so systematically and effectively used in the subsequent advances on Corinth and in all the later campaigns of the war. Last, not least, there lay special weakness in the fact that the very front divisions contained a number of entirely raw regiments which had had hardly any drilling and but limited knowledge of the use of their arms. Hence it was inevitable that, when the hostile array surged upon the camps like a flood tide, the instant effect was confusion, terror, and all but panic.

The rebel advance began before six A.M. By seven, the front line had reached the Federal advance-guard and firing commenced. Sherman even then did not apprehend a general attack, but sent word of the appearance of the enemy in force in his immediate front to Generals Prentiss, McClernand, and Hurlbut, asking the two latter—he could not “order” them—to get ready to support him and Prentiss respectively with their commands. While a fusillade was uninterruptedly going on between seven and eight along his line, it was only at eight that he became “satisfied for the first time,” to quote from his report, “that the enemy designed a determined attack upon our