But the three months were now nearly expired, and nothing had been done to make an end of the "nonsense." The terms of service of many regiments were soon to expire and there seemed to be no general disposition on the part of the men composing them to enter into new enlistments. It was obvious that unless the "army" at and near Washington should go forward at once, crush Beauregard's greatly inferior force, march on to Richmond and make an end of the difficulty, new levies must be called for and a new strain put upon the endurance and the patience of the people. All this impatience found daily and often intemperate expression in the newspapers, whose rivalry in clamor fanned the flame of discontent among the people. Desk strategists who knew nothing of war's conditions had an easy task in figuring out with their blue pencils an absolutely certain victory for the Federal arms, if only the Federal generals could be persuaded or compelled by public opinion to avail themselves of their matchless opportunity. "Are not two more than one? And have not we the two to our enemy's one? What dullards and laggards our generals must be to delay for a day or an hour!" So ran the editorial argument, and that argument seemed to the people conclusive and convincing, for the reason that the people generally were as ignorant as the strategists of the editorial rooms themselves concerning the conditions that govern battle and the training necessary to convert civilian volunteers into soldiers fit to face a fire of musketry and cannon. The military men knew better, of course. Except the superannuated commander-in-chief, General Scott, not one of them had ever commanded so much as a brigade in battle, but at least they had been taught in a military school and many of them had seen fighting. They knew the peril of hurling ill-organized regiments of utterly untrained and undisciplined civilians upon the chosen positions of an armed foe, even when that foe's forces were in a like condition of undisciplined inefficiency. The arithmetical argument in no degree deceived them. They knew that with such men as they had under their command strength could not be safely reckoned by a mere numerical count, that under certain easily imagined conditions, indeed, strength must often be in inverse ratio to numbers. They perfectly knew that for them to advance against the Confederates with an army in such condition as theirs was at that time was to take a fearful risk of defeat, disastrous and demoralizing to the army and dangerously discouraging to the country behind the army.