would have been better to join Schenck to Benham by a forced march as soon as the latter was at the mouth of Loup Creek, and then to push the whole to the Fayette and Raleigh road, Rosecrans leading the column in person. As Floyd seems to have been ignorant of what was going on in Loup Creek valley, decisive results might have followed from anticipating him on his line of retreat. Capturing such a force, or, as the phrase then went, "bagging it," is easier talked of than done; but it is quite probable that it might have been so scattered and demoralized as to be of little further value as an army, and considerable parts of it might have been taken prisoners. Rosecrans had begun the campaign in August with the announced purpose of marching to Wytheville and Abingdon in the Holston valley, and thence into East Tennessee. McClellan had cherished the idea of making the Kanawha line the base of operations into the same region; still later Fremont, and after him Halleck did the same. Looking only at the map, it seemed an easy thing to do; but the almost wilderness character of the intervening country with its poor and sparsely scattered people, the weary miles of steep mountain-roads becoming impassable in rainy weather, and the total absence of forage for animals, were elements of the problem which they all ignored or greatly underestimated. It was easy, sitting at one's office table, to sweep the hand over a few inches of chart showing next to nothing of the topography, and to say, "We will march from here to here;" but when the march was undertaken, the natural obstacles began to assert themselves, and one general after another had to find apologies for failing to accomplish what ought never to have been undertaken. After a year or two, the military advisers of the War Department began to realize how closely the movements of great bodies of soldiers were tied to rivers and railways; but they seemed to learn it only as the merest civilian could learn it, by the experience of repeated failures of plans based on long lines of communication over forest-clad mountains, dependent upon wagons to carry everything for man and beast. Instead of reaching Wytheville or Abingdon, Rosecrans found that he could not supply his little army even at Big Sewell Mountain; and except for a few days, he occupied no part of the country in advance of my positions in August, then held by a single brigade in the presence of the same enemy. It was not Floyd's army, but the physical obstacles presented by the country that chained him to Gauley Bridge. I shall have occasion hereafter to note how the same ignoring of nature's laws came near starving Burnside's command in East Tennessee, where the attempt to supply it by wagon trains from Lexington in Kentucky or from Nashville failed so utterly as to disappear from the calculation of our problem of existence through the winter of 1863-64. CHAPTER VIII WINTER-QUARTERS