It is not easy to imagine a completer or more disastrous defeat than this of the Seven Days, or an enforced retreat more humiliating. Yet at the last moment McClellan was enabled, by the mistake or the misconduct of Lee's lieutenants, to escape to Malvern Hill, under cover of his gunboats, and there Lee mistakenly assailed him, thus giving him, at the end of a series of conspicuous defeats, the appearance at least of a compensating victory. Malvern Hill is rather a high plateau than a hill in the proper sense of the term. It lies about sixty feet above the surrounding country. It is a mile wide and a mile and a half long. At its base is a network of streams and impassable swamp lands, constituting a natural fortification practically impassable to any army in the field except at one point where a narrow road leads up the hill. The plateau lies so close to the James river that gunboats anchored in that stream can command its one approach with deadly certainty. Here McClellan stood at bay. Here a wise direction should have made an end of the Confederate pursuit of him. To assail him there was to invite needless slaughter with no hope of any result commensurate with the inevitable sacrifice of human life. But the Confederates were flushed with a week of continuous victories, and they hurled themselves recklessly upon Malvern Hill, hoping there to retrieve their lost opportunity of destroying or capturing the army that a week earlier had besieged and threatened Richmond. The assault upon such a position ought not to have been made at all. Still worse, it was blunderingly made. The Confederates were not ready to bring their whole force into action when the first advance occurred, or in any wise to support the assailing force. Seven thousand men, with six guns, charged up the slope. There were thirty guns in position to sweep them away as with a broom, and many times seven thousand men to resist their advance. There was also the terrific fire of the gunboats to tear their columns into shreds and to throw their men into confusion. Still more important perhaps was the fact that the Confederate artillery had not yet been organized as a separate arm of the service. Each brigade had its battery, but there was nowhere any authority to bring these scattered batteries together and make them effective by massing them. Six guns in the presence of thirty were quickly put out of action, and throughout the day there was a like disproportion, due to the mistaken system which assigned batteries to brigades instead of organizing the whole artillery force into a single arm of the service and placing each corps of it under a commander of its own who could mass it at will and make it effective by concentration. McClellan had massed his artillery; Lee had not massed his. The result was that McClellan's artillery fire quickly dismounted Lee's guns and rendered them useless.