“On the shore I encountered a scene which has often been described. The face of the bluff was crowded with stragglers from the battle. The number that at different times has been estimated at five thousand in the morning to fifteen thousand in the evening. The number at nightfall would never have fallen short of fifteen thousand, including those who had passed down the river, and the less callous, but still broken and demoralized, fragments about the camps on the plateau near the landing. At the top of the bluff all was confusion. Men mounted and on foot and wagons with their teams and excited drivers, all struggling their way closest to the river, were mixed up in apparently inextricable confusion with a battery of artillery which was standing in park without men or horses to man or move it.” There lives near me in honor and good name, General Gates P. Thruston, one of the greatest scholars of the South, and perhaps the greatest living ethnologists of this country. He was with Buell, and corroborates his chief, and he refers me to General Lew Wallace’s oration, delivered at Shiloh, April 6th, 1903, in which General Wallace uses the following language: “Did any of you, my friends, ever hear of an army fighting a battle without a commander? No? Well, that was the case with the Army of the Tennessee at the beginning of the first day here. The five divisions on the field had each its chief, to be sure; but none of the five chiefs was in general command. Instead of one supreme governing will, nowhere so essential as in battle, there were five officers, each independent of the others. Between them things were done by request, not orders. No one of them was responsible for what the others did. I am sure you will see the enormity of the disadvantage. You will even wonder that there was any resistance made. “I may not pass this point without an explanation. To do so would be grossest injustice. General Grant, as everybody knows, was in command of the Army of the Tennessee at the time. By order of General Halleck, his headquarters were at Savannah, ten miles below Pittsburg Landing. Hearing the guns, he made all haste to the scene of action, arriving there four hours after the attack began. It was then too late for him to change the day. The battle had passed beyond his control.