A panic or two, with all the disgrace and suffering that attach to such hysterical paroxysms, or at least a defeat, are the experiences through which half-organized bodies often pass to teach them the meaning of discipline and mechanical habit.  An army must go through the annealing process like glass; let a few regiments be cracked to pieces because their leaders did not know how to withdraw them gradually from the furnace of action, and the lesson will be all the better remembered because taught by a costly example.  Our early mishaps were all predicted, sometimes in formal shape, as in various letters dated long before the breaking out of hostilities, and very often in the common talk of those about us.  But, after all, when the first chastisement from our hard schoolmaster, Experience, comes upon us, it is a kind of surprise, in spite of all our preparation.

A writer in the present number of this magazine shows us that there is a complete literature of panics, not merely as occurring among new levies, but seizing on the best-appointed armies, containing as much individual bravery as any that never ran away from an enemy.  The men of Israel gave way before the men of Benjamin, “retired” in the language of Scripture, in order to lead them into ambush.  At a given signal they faced about, and the men of Benjamin “were amazed” (panic-struck) and “turned their backs before the men of Israel unto the way of the wilderness,”—­took to the woods, as we should say.  Their enemies did not lie still or run as fast the other way, like ours at Bull Run, but they “inclosed” them, and “chased them, and trode them down with ease,” and “gleaned of them in the highways,” and “pursued hard after them.”  Yet “all these were men of valor.”

Not to return to our old classical friends, what modern nation has ever known how to fight that had not learned how to be beaten and how to run?  The English ran ninety miles from Bannockburn, seared by the “gillies” and the baggage-wagons.  They paid back their debt at Culloden.  The Prussian armies were routed at Jena and Auerstaedt.  They had their revenge in the “sauve qui peut” of Waterloo.  The great armada, British and French, undertook to bombard Sebastopol, and eight ships of the line were so mauled that they had to go back to Toulon and Portsmouth for repairs.  Lord Raglan is said to have so far despaired of success as to have contemplated raising the siege.

Everybody remembers the feeling produced by the repeated fruitless attacks on the fortifications, the three unsuccessful bombardments, the divided counsels, the disappointment and death of Lord Raglan, the complaints of Canrobert of the want of a single commanding intellect, and the relinquishment of his own position to Pelissier, itself a confession of failure.  If there ever was a campaign begun with defeat and disaster, it was that which ended with the fall of Sebastopol.