So, the mountain companies did not at once fall into ordered and frictionless assimilation in the big military machine--did not at once become anonymous units. Yet even in the feud, men acknowledged the necessity, when need arose, of sinking the personal grievance in obedience to the clan requirement. With officers who failed to understand them and who had not been willing to make haste slowly, they would have become a mob of constant mutineers. But they were a part of a regiment whose peace-footing was two battalions, and whose colonel, though a bluegrass Kentuckian, understood and loved highland and lowland alike. The two Breathitt county companies with another that had marched forty-five miles from over near the Virginia line to entrain, made up one battalion, while the other was from the edge of the bluegrass. When he joined his bearded barbarians at Chickamauga, Colonel Burford smiled happily. To him they were big-boned children, but he nursed them along and taught them that the swift, military obedience asked of them was not a concession to individuals, but to abstract efficiency, and that this efficiency was their own chief interest. So, they came with astounding haste into a full acceptance of the necessity. They were still raw and looked like half-barbaric allies from the hinterland--as they were. They wore their shirt-tails out like Chinamen on the long and dusty hikes, and their service hats tilted at a dozen disreputable angles. They still bantered each other in quaint Elizabethan English drawled in nasal tones, but also they watched with keen, unblinking eyes the machine-like evenness of the regulars, which it became their care, with swift absorption, to imitate. They were the Second battalion of the Fifth Kentucky, but they were better known as the "Shirt-tail battalion," and their far-seeing colonel seemed, on the whole, contented with them. When other commands complained and sulked in the Georgia climate, and crowded the hospitals, these mountaineers throve and said nothing. To them the army ration was an improvement over their accustomed fare. On kitchen detail they scowled, but served with stoicism--though "sich-like was women's work"--and, when they went out as provost guardsmen to round up the recalcitrant, they brought back their prisoners with business-like despatch. Though they were seeing a new life, every detail of which was wonderful to them, no sign or exclamation of surprise escaped their bearded lips. The Kentucky mountaineer might walk through the Champs Elysées of Paris, battered, threadbare and ignorant, but he would carry his head high and gaze straight at every man, eye to eye, giving no indication that any sight was new or unaccustomed.