Information had to be gleaned by reconnaissance; and reconnaissance takes time, especially without trustworthy guides, sufficient cavalry, and a proper staff. Moreover, the army was all parts and no whole, through no fault of McDowell's or of his military chiefs. The three-month volunteers, whose term of service was nearly over, had not learned their drill as individuals before being herded into companies, battalions, and brigades, of course becoming more and more inefficient as the units grew more and more complex. Of the still more essential discipline they naturally knew still less. There was no lack of courage; for these were the same breed of men as those with whom Washington had won immortal fame, the same as those with whom both Grant and Lee were yet to win it. But, as Napoleon used to say, mere men are not the same as soldiers. Nor are armed mobs the same as armies.
The short march to the front was both confused and demoralizing.
No American officer had ever had the chance even of seeing, much less handling, thirty-six thousand men under arms. This force was followed by an immense and unwieldy train of supplies, manned by wholly undisciplined civilian drivers; while other, and quite superfluous, civilians clogged every movement and made confusion worse confounded. "The march," says Sherman, who commanded a brigade, "demonstrated little save the general laxity of discipline; for, with all my personal efforts, I could not prevent the men from straggling for water, blackberries, or anything on the way they fancied." In the whole of the first long summer's day, the sixteenth of July, the army only marched six miles; and it took the better part of the seventeenth to herd its stragglers back again. "I wished them, " says McDowell, "to go to Centreville the second day [only another six miles out] but the men were footweary, not so much by the distance marched as by the time they had been on foot." That observant private, Warren Lee Goss, has told us how hard it is to soldier suddenly. "My canteen banged against my bayonet; both tin cup and bayonet badly interfered with the butt of my musket, while my cartridge-box and haversack were constantly flopping up and down--the whole jangling like loose harness and chains on a runaway horse." The weather was hot. The roads were dusty. And many a man threw away parts of his kit for which he suffered later on. There was food in superabundance. But, with that unwieldy and grossly undisciplined supply-and-transport service, the men and their food never came together at the proper time.
Early on the eighteenth McDowell, whose own work was excellent all through, pushed forward a brigade against Blackburn's Ford, toward the Confederate right, in order to distract attention from the real objective, which was to be the turning of the left. The Confederate outposts fell back beyond the ford. The Federal brigade followed on; when suddenly sharp volleys took it in front and flank. The opposing brigade, under Longstreet (of whom we shall often hear again), had lain concealed and sprung its trap quite neatly. Most of the Federals behaved extremely well under these untoward circumstances. But one whole battery and another whole battalion, whose term of service expired that afternoon, were officially reported as having "moved to the rear to the sound of the enemy's cannon." Thereafter, as military units, they simply ceased to exist.
At one o'clock in the morning of this same day Johnston received a telegram at Winchester, from Richmond, warning him that McDowell was advancing on Bull Run, with the evident intention of seizing Manassas Junction, which would cut the Confederate rail communication with the Shenandoah Valley and so prevent all chance of immediate concentration at Bull Run. Johnston saw that the hour had come. It could not have come before, as Lee and the rest had foreseen; because an earlier concentration at Bull Run would have drawn the two superior Federal forces together on the selfsame spot. There was still some risk about giving Patterson the slip. True, his three-month special-constable array was semi-mutinous already; and its term of service had only a few more days to run. True, also, that the men had cause for grievance. They were all without pay, and some of them were reported as being still "without pants." But, despite such drawbacks, a resolute attack by Patterson's fourteen thousand could have at least held fast Johnston's eleven thousand, who were mostly little better off in military ways. Patterson, however, suffered from distracting orders, and that was his undoing. Johnston, admirably screened by Stuart, drew quietly away, leaving his sick at Winchester and raising the spirits of his whole command by telling them that Beauregard was in danger and that they were to "make a forced march to save the country."Straining every nerve they stepped out gallantly and covered mile after mile till they reached the Shenandoah, forded it, and crossed the Blue Ridge at Ashby's Gap. But lack of training and march discipline told increasingly against them. "The discouragement of that day's march," said Johnston, "is indescribable. Frequent and unreasonable delays caused so slow a rate of marching as to make me despair of joining General Beauregard in time to aid him." Even the First Brigade, with all the advantages of leading the march and of having learnt the rudiments of drill and discipline, was exhausted by a day's work that it could have romped through later on. Jackson himself stood guard alone till dawn while all his soldiers slept.
As Jackson's men marched down to take the train at Piedmont, Stuart gayly trotted past, having left Patterson still in ignorance that Johnston's force had gone. By four in the afternoon of the nineteenth Jackson was detraining at Manassas.