It is well to remember that General Grant, on whom the responsibility of the campaign and impending conflict rested, had been actually present with his army but twenty days when the battle commenced; that he did not select the position of the advance divisions of his army, and could not, if he had chosen to do so, have changed the place of the junction of Buell's army with his, as Halleck had fixed upon Savannah as that place, and Buell was slowly marching towards it before Grant's arrival there. The unfriendly disposition of Halleck and the lack of cordiality of Buell towards Grant made matters extremely embarrassing. Buell was Grant's junior, but he had commanded a department for a considerable time while Grant only commanded a district, and this alone may account for a natural reluctance on Buell's part to serve under him. Had Buell's army arrived promptly on the Tennessee, the battle of Shiloh would not have been fought, as both Johnston and Beauregard determined the attack was only practicable before Grant's and Buell's armies united. Grant was seriously injured, after dark on the 4th of April, while returning to Pittsburg Landing in a rain storm from investigating some unusual picket firing at the front. His horse had fallen on him, injuring his leg and spraining an ankle so much that his boot had to be cut off. He was unable to walk without the aid of crutches for some days after the battle.( 7) In the controversy as to whether the Union Army at Shiloh was surprised on the morning of the first day I do not care to enter. The testimony of Sherman and his brigade commander, General Ralph P. Buckland, as well as that of Grant, will all of whom I have conversed on this point, should be taken as conclusive, that as early as the 4th of April they knew of the presence of considerable organizations of Confederate cavalry, and that on the evening of the 5th they had encountered such numbers of the enemy as to satisfy the Union officers on the field that the enemy contemplated making an attack; yet it is quite certain these officers did not know on the evening of April 5th that the splendidly officered and organized Confederate Army was in position in front and close up to Shiloh Church as a centre, in full array, with a definite plan, fully understood by all its officers, for a battle on the morrow. Nothing had gone amiss in Johnston's plan, save the loss of _one day_, which postponed the opening of the attack from dawn of Saturday to the same time on Sunday. The friends of the Confederacy will never cease to deplore the loss, on the march from Corinth of this _one_ day. Many yet pretend to think the fate of slavery and the Confederacy turned on it. Grant was not quite so well prepared for battle on Saturday as on Sunday, and no part of the Army of the Ohio could or would have come to his aid sooner than Sunday. Grant, however, says he did not despair of success without Buell's army,( 7)