This photograph, taken at Wilcox Landing, near City Point, gives an excellent idea of the difficulties under which telegraphing was done at the front or on the march. With a tent-fly for shelter and a hard-tack box for a table, the resourceful operator mounted his "relay," tested his wire, and brought the commanding general into direct communication with separated brigades or divisions. The U. S. Military Telegraph Corps, through its Superintendent of Construction, Dennis Doren, kept Meade and both wings of his army in communication from the crossing of the Rapidan in May, 1864, till the siege of Petersburg. Over this field-line Grant received daily reports from four separate armies, numbering a quarter of a million men, and replied with daily directions for their operations over an area of seven hundred and fifty thousand square miles. Though every corps of Meade's army moved daily, Doren kept them in touch with headquarters. The field-line was built of seven twisted, rubber-coated wires which were hastily strung on trees or fences. TELEGRAPHING FOR THE ARMIES [Illustration: ANDREW CARNEGIE SUPERINTENDED MILITARY RAILWAYS AND GOVERNMENT TELEGRAPH LINES IN 1861] ANDREW CARNEGIE The man who established the Federal military telegraph system amid the first horrors of war was to become one of the world's foremost advocates of peace. As the right hand man of Thomas A. Scott, Assistant Secretary of War, he came to Washington in '61, and was immediately put in charge of the field work of reestablishing communication between the Capital and the North, cut off by the Maryland mobs. A telegraph operator himself, he inaugurated the system of cipher despatches for the War Department and secured the trusted operators with whom the service was begun. A young man of twenty-four at the time, he was one of the last to leave the battlefield of Bull Run, and his duties of general superintendence over the network of railroads and telegraph lines made him a witness of war's cruelties on other fields until he with his chief left the government service June 1, 1862. THE MILITARY FIELD TELEGRAPH [Illustration: THE MILITARY TELEGRAPH IN THE FIELD] "No orders ever had to be given to establish the telegraph." Thus wrote General Grant in his memoirs. "The moment troops were in position to go into camp, the men would put up their wires." Grant pays a glowing tribute to "the organization and discipline of this body of brave and intelligent men." [Illustration: THE ARMY SAVING THE NAVY IN MAY, 1864 COPYRIGHT, 1911, REVIEW OF REVIEWS CO.] [Illustration]