another. The losses were the same, in round numbers, as at the historic battle of Blenheim, though the number of men engaged was fewer by one-fourth. If we should read in to-morrow's paper that by some disaster every man, woman, and child in the city of Concord, N. H., had been either killed or injured, and in the next day's paper that the same thing had happened in Montgomery, Ala., the loss of life and limb would only equal what took place on the mournful field of Shiloh. [Illustration: GENERAL ALBERT SIDNEY JOHNSTON, C. S. A.] [Illustration: GENERAL BRAXTON BRAGG, C. S. A.] [Illustration: MAJOR-GENERAL DON CARLOS BUELL.] [Illustration: MAJOR-GENERAL LEW WALLACE.] General Grant, in the first article that he ever wrote for publication, remarks that "the battle of Shiloh, or Pittsburg Landing, has been perhaps less understood, or, to state the case more accurately, more persistently misunderstood, than any other engagement between National and Confederate troops during the entire rebellion. Correct reports of the battle have been published, but all of these appeared long subsequent to the close of the rebellion, and after public opinion had been most erroneously formed." No battle is ever fought that it is not for somebody's interest to misrepresent. In the case of Shiloh there were peculiar and complicated reasons both for intentional misrepresentation and for innocent error. The plans of the commanders on both sides were to some extent thwarted and changed by unexpected events. One commander was killed on the first day, and his admirers naturally speculate upon the different results that might have been attained if he had lived. The ground was so broken as to divide the engagement practically into several separate actions, and what was true of one might not be true of another. The peculiarity of the position also brought together in one place, under the river-bank, all who from fright or demoralization fled to the rear of the National army, which produced upon those who saw them an effect altogether different from that of the usual retreating and straggling across the whole breadth of a battle line. Then there was the circumstance of Buell's army coming up at the end of the first day, and not coming up before that, which could hardly fail to give rise to somewhat of jealousy and recrimination. And finally this action encounters to an unusual extent that criticism which reads by the light of after-events, but forgets that this was wanting to the actors whom it criticises.