The troops were for the most part new and untried, and the conditions of the ground made the transmission of orders difficult and uncertain. It was impossible for commanders of large bodies to obtain a comprehensive view of the field so as to perceive and provide intelligently for the varying exigencies of the battle as it progressed. They could only guess the swaying movements of the fight by sounds of musketry and by the chance reports of messengers who could locate nothing by fixed monuments. Nor could the men in ranks, or even regimental officers, see beyond a limited distance; and the direction of enfilading or turning movements could be discovered only by the course of bullets among the trees or the tearing of the ground by solid shot or shell. These things made the battle a supreme test of the quality of the individual units of the army rather than of any directing skill of its higher commanders. The bulldog courage of individual groups of men who hung on and fought “to a finish,” or who, like Prentiss, sacrificed themselves where they stood because of no order to withdraw, delayed the general advance of the enemy and thus saved the first day from overwhelming and complete disaster. It became a case of “night or Blücher;” and when, toward evening, the leading regiments of Buell’s army arrived upon the field and interposed a fresh line of resistance, the Union troops had been driven from the field and huddled as a mass of disorganized fragments in a semicircle of half a mile radius about the landing. But the Confederates drew off flushed with the spirit of victory and ceased fighting only to prepare for an expected certain and triumphant finish in the morning. Knowing that they had the Union forces hemmed in the semicircle of their lines extending from river to river, every Confederate soldier fully believed that surrender or annihilation of the Union forces would be easy of accomplishment.