Upon their minds the influence was even greater than upon their bodies. More enthusiastic soldiers never assembled in the world than came up from all parts of the country to the various rendezvous of our volunteers. This is not merely the partial judgment of a fellow countryman. In conversation with old European officers of great experience, who had spent the autumn in instructing different regiments, I have heard testimony to this effect more flattering than anything which I, as an American, should dare to say. Of course a part of this enthusiasm was founded on an illusion which experience must sooner or later have dispelled; but wise policy would have husbanded it as long as possible, by putting them into service which should at the same time have fed their love of adventure and given them practice in arms. Even as a matter of drill--which to some of our officers seems to be the great end, and not merely the means of a soldier's life--this would have been an advantage. The drill of a camp of instruction is not only monotonous, but meaningless, because neither officers nor men are yet alive to its practical application. Had these men been placed at once where something _seemed_ to depend on their activity, instruction in tactics would have been eagerly sought after, instead of being looked upon as an irksome daily task. Nor would it have been necessary for this purpose to place raw troops in positions of critical importance. The vast extent of our line of operations, and the wide tracts of disaffected country which were, or _might easily have been_, left behind it, offered an ample field for a training as thorough as the most rigid martinet could desire, at a safe distance from any enemy in force, but where they would have been kept under the _qui vive_ by the belief that something was intrusted to them. Drill or no drill, I do not think there was a colonel in the barracks who did not know that his men would have been worth more if marched from the place of enlistment directly into the open field, than they were after months in a place where the whole tendency was to chill their patriotism by making them feel useless, and to wear off the fine edge of their patriotism by subjection to the merest mechanical process of instruction.