At dawn Grant, now reinforced by twenty-five thousand fresh men under Buell and Lew Wallace, took the offensive. Beauregard, hopelessly outnumbered and without a single fresh man, retired on Corinth, magnificently covered by Bragg's rearguard, which held the Federals back for hours near the crucial point of Shiloh Church. Shiloh was the fiercest battle ever fought in the River War. The losses were over ten thousand a side in killed and wounded; while a thousand Confederates and three thousand Federals were captured. It was a Confederate failure; but hardly the kind of victory the Federals needed just then, before the consummate triumph of Farragut at New Orleans. It brought together Federal forces that the Confederates could not possibly withstand, even on their new line east from Memphis. But it did not raise the Federal, or depress the Confederate, morale. Four days after the battle Halleck arrived at Pittsburg Landing and took command of the combined armies. He was soon reinforced by Pope; whereupon he divided the whole into right and left wings, center, and reserve, each under its own commander. Grant was made second in command of the whole. But, as Halleck dealt directly with his other immediate subordinates, Grant simply became the fifth wheel of the Halleckian slow-coach, which, after twenty days of preparation, began, with most elaborate precautions, its crawl toward Corinth. Grant's position became so nearly unbearable that he applied more than once for transfer to some other place. But this was refused. So he strove to do his impossible duty till the middle of July, when his punishment for Shiloh was completed by his promotion to command a depleted remnant of Halleck's Grand Army. It is not by any means the least of Grant's claims to real greatness that, as a leader, he was able to survive his most searching trials: the surprise at Shiloh, the misunderstandings and arrest that followed Shiloh, the slur of being made a fifth-wheel second-in-command, the demoralizing strain of that "most anxious period of the war" when his depleted forces were thrown back on the defensive, and the eight discouraging months of Sisyphean offensive which preceded his triumph at Vicksburg. No one who has not been in the heart of things with fighting fleets or armies can realize what it means to all ranks when there is, or even is supposed to be, "something wrong" with the living pivot on which the whole force turns. And only those who have been behind the scenes of war's all-testing drama can understand what it means for even an imagined "failure" to "come back."