Just how well we did our work was never put to a test, as our army withdrew from Corinth before it was assailed; but our knowledge of the country and of the necessities of that troubled time is mutely reflected in the remaining sections of that great coil of clay, in its segment of seven miles, still plainly visible after the rains and snows and frosts and freezes have charged against them through sixty years. At the point in our line of fortifications where the road forks, one prong going eastward by Box Chapel and Farmington and the other in a northeasterly direction to Pea Ridge and Pittsburg Landing, we built double communicating lines and placed siege guns. When we had finished our fortifications and mounted heavy guns at the points of greatest danger, we settled down to await the approach of the Union Army under the direct command of General Halleck, moving upon us with an extreme and timid caution, which forever consigned him to a place among the world’s smallest commanders of great armies. One cannot imagine Lee or Grant or Stonewall Jackson or W. T. Sherman taking more than a month to cover twenty miles in pursuit of a smaller and defeated army. Napoleon or Hannibal, at Shiloh on the night of April 7, 1862, would have found the Confederate Army or the gates of Corinth before sunrise the next morning. Heretofore in our fights in this theater of war the Union forces had enjoyed the co-operation of the gunboats, and now we were all elated over the prospect of meeting the enemy out of range of his floating batteries. I was too young to know anything of the strategy of war, but the knowing ones were pointing out the reasons why the Confederates had to defend Corinth. It was at the crossing of the only two trunk lines in the South at that time, and by these lines the Confederacy could transport whatever supplies, men, and guns it possessed to this point. Corinth was the key to the richness of the Mississippi Valley and the outer gateway to the Eastern South; and so if with these reasons urging Richmond, Corinth and these two essential lines of transportation could not be saved, the future of the Confederacy would be dark indeed. My father made this gloomy forecast to me when Corinth was evacuated; and although I fought on as a stern duty, I never again hoped for the success of our cause.