No doubt at this time, while Carleton was writing so brilliantly to a quarter of a million readers, many of them envied him his opportunities. Distance lent enchantment to the view. "But let me say," wrote Carleton, "if they were once brought into close contact with all the dreadful realities of war,--if they were obliged to stand the chances of getting their heads knocked off, or blown to atoms by an unexpected shell, or bored through with a minie ball,--to stand their chances of being captured by the enemy,--to live on bread and water, and little of it, as all of the correspondents have been obliged to do the past week,--to sleep on the ground, or on a sack of corn, or in a barn, with the wind blowing a gale, and the snow whirling in drifts, and the thermometer shrunk to zero,--and then, after the battle is over and the field won, to walk among the dying and the dead, to behold all the ghastly sights of trunkless heads and headless trunks,--to see the human form mutilated, disfigured, torn, and mangled by shot and shell,--to step in pools of blood,--to hear all around sighs, groans, imprecations, and prayers from dying men,--they would be content to let others become historians of the war. But this is not all; a correspondent must keep ever in view the thousands that are looking at the journal he represents, who expect his account at the earliest possible moment. If he is behindhand, his occupation is gone. His account must be first, or among the first, or it is nothing. Day and night he must be on the alert, improving every opportunity and turning it to account. If he loses a steamboat trip, or a train of cars, or a mail, it is all up with him. He might as well put his pencil in his pocket and go home." Carleton had a hearty laugh over a letter from a friend who advised him "to take more time and rewrite his letters," adding that it would be for his benefit. To Carleton, who often wrote amid the smoke of battle or on deck amid bursting shells, or while flying over the prairies at the rate of thirty-five miles an hour, in order, first of all, to be ahead of his rivals, this seemed a joke. In after-years of calm and leisure, when writing his books, he painted word pictures and finished his chapters, giving them a rhetorical gloss impossible when writing in haste against the pressure of rushing time. Although Boston was two hundred miles farther from Cairo than New York, yet all New England had read Carleton's account in the _Journal_ before any correspondent's letters from Fort Donelson or Henry appeared in the newspapers of Manhattan.