But something had to be done. These three-month men would be going home soon and we’d have to begin all over. The people of the North, having had such a long sleep, demanded action. What matter if we did throw our poor men into a raging torrent before we taught them how to swim. On to Richmond! Those who had said there couldn’t be any war, were the loudest in screaming for a fight. On to Richmond! So McDowell became the scape-goat. He had to go. They gave him only thirty thousand men, but that was ten times more than any active officer in the regular army had ever had a chance to handle. They also gave him eight days in which to transform this excursion into an army. Eight days. It was a compliment to his magical powers. But the administration and the country were really serious about it. So he took them out to do battle. Fatigue, waste, meandering, sore feet, green apples, overdrinking and all those hundreds of vices, which the recruit learns to get over, appeared on the march--a march that allowed him to go the great distance of fifteen miles in two days. What else could have happened at Bull Run but what _did_ happen? Of course they’d run. It wasn’t their fault, nor had it anything to do with their bravery. It always will happen when untrained men meet a sudden reversal. Training and discipline are the equivalent of confidence, and these men hadn’t been allowed by their people to have any confidence. Some of them never stopped fleeing till they got to New York. Had it not been that there were a few trained regulars to stop the onrush of the Confederates, more men would have been uselessly slaughtered. This spectacle gave us less than _nothing_. So we proceeded to call out one _million_ men with more pandemonium, more ill-supplied concentrations, more sufferings and more expense. Two weeks ago a listener to these talks, a total stranger to me, sent me an extract from a diary of a gentleman now living, a survivor of this war, one of those noblemen who at this period of the story volunteered to be met with unnecessary cruelty by his country. Here is some of the extract: “In due time we arrived in Washington on a drizzly, sloppy evening and were marched to and housed in some large building already occupied by larger numbers than should have been there. We had no food, the place was dimly lighted with smoking torches. The floor was so muddy and foul that we could not lie down and no place for so doing being provided. We stood and shivered and said things and wondered if all heroes lived in such style as this.” The diary goes on to show how this detachment wandered about unassigned to any organization, for days without food, and living in indescribable filth. That is a sample of what these hordes of fine men suddenly called out, suffered. The author of this diary is now ninety-one, one of the few left to tell the tale. Let me extend to him the admiration and gratitude of our army for his needless and heroic endurance and fortitude.