With all his regard for Napoleon’s maxims, Jackson was no slave to rule.  In war, circumstances vary to such an extent that a manoeuvre, which at one time is manifestly unsound, may at another be the most judicious.  The so-called rules are never binding; they merely point out the risks which are generally entailed by some particular course of action.  There is no principle on which Napoleon lays more stress than that a general should never divide his force, either on the field of battle or the theatre of war.  But when he marched to M’Dowell and left Ewell at Swift Run Gap, Jackson deliberately divided his forces and left Banks between them, knowing that the apparent risk, with an opponent like Banks, was no risk at all.  At the battle of Winchester, too, there was a gap of a mile between the brigades on the left of the Kernstown road and Ewell on the right; and owing to the intervening hills, one wing was invisible to the other.  Here again, like Moltke at Koniggratz, Jackson realised that the principle might be disregarded not only with impunity but with effect.  He was not like Lord Galway, “a man who was in war what Moliere’s doctors were in medicine, who thought it much more honourable to fail according to rule than to succeed by innovation."* (* Macaulay.)

But the triumphs of the Valley campaign were not due alone to the orders issued by Lee and Jackson.  The Confederate troops displayed extraordinary endurance.  When the stragglers were eliminated their stauncher comrades proved themselves true as steel.  In every engagement the regiments fought with stubborn courage.  They sometimes failed to break the enemy’s line at the first rush; but, except at Kernstown, the Federals never drove them from their position, and Taylor’s advance at Winchester, Trimble’s counterstroke at Cross Keys, the storming of the battery at Port Republic, and the charge of the cavalry at Cedarville, were the deeds of brave and resolute men.

A retreat is the most exhausting of military movements.  It is costly in men, “more so,” says Napoleon, “than two battles,” and it shakes the faith of the soldiers in their general and in themselves.  Jackson’s army retreated for seven days before Fremont, dwindling in numbers at every step, and yet it never fought better than when it turned at bay.  From first to last it believed itself superior to its enemies; from first to last it was equal to the tasks which its exacting commander imposed upon it, and its spirit was indomitable throughout.  “One male a week and three foights a day,” according to one of Jackson’s Irishmen, was the rule in the campaigns of 1862.  The forced marches were not made in luxury.  Not seldom only half-rations were issued, and more often none at all.  The weather, for many days in succession, was abominable, and the forest bivouacs were comfortless in the extreme.  On May 25 twenty per cent of Trimble’s brigade went into action barefoot; and had it not been for the stores captured in Winchester, the march to the Potomac, and the subsequent unmolested retreat to Woodstock, would have been hardly possible.