river which was one of the great military objects of the North.  Furthermore, successful work was being done still further West by General Curtis in Missouri, who drove an invading force back into Arkansas and inflicted a crushing defeat upon them there in March.  But a great stroke should now have been struck.  Buell, it is said, saw plainly that his forces and Halleck’s should have been concentrated as far up the Tennessee as possible in an endeavour to seize upon the main railway system of the Confederacy in the West.  Halleck preferred, it would seem, to concentrate upon nothing and to scatter his forces upon minor enterprises, provided he did not risk any important engagement.  An important engagement with the hope of destroying an army of the enemy was the very thing which, as Johnston’s forces now stood, he should have sought, but he appears to have been contented by the temporary retirement of an unscathed enemy who would return again reinforced.  Buell was an unlucky man, and Halleck got quite all he deserved, so it is possible that events have been described to us without enough regard to Halleck’s case as against Buell.  But at any rate, while much should have been happening, nothing very definite did happen till April 6, when Albert Johnston, now strongly reinforced from the extreme South, came upon Grant, who (it is not clear why) had lain encamped, without entrenching, and not expecting immediate attack, near Shiloh, far up the Tennessee River in the extreme south of Tennessee State.  Buell at the time, though without clear information as to Grant’s danger, was on his way to join him.  There seems to have been negligence both on Halleck’s part and on Grant’s.  The battle of Shiloh is said to have been highly characteristic of the combats of partly disciplined armies, in which the individual qualities, good or bad, of the troops play a conspicuous part.  Direction on the part of Johnston or Grant was not conspicuously seen, but the latter, whose troops were surprised and driven back some distance, was intensely determined.  In the course of that afternoon Albert Johnston was killed.  Rightly or wrongly Jefferson Davis and his other friends regarded his death as the greatest of calamities to the South.  After the manner of many battles, more especially in this war, the battle of Shiloh was the subject of long subsequent dispute between friends of Grant and of Buell, and far more bitter dispute between friends of Albert Johnston and Beauregard.  But it seems that the South was on the point of winning, till late on the 6th the approach of the first reinforcements from Buell made it useless to attempt more.  By the following morning further large reinforcements had come up; Grant in his turn attacked, and Beauregard had difficulty in turning a precipitate retirement into an orderly retreat upon Corinth, forty miles away, a junction upon the principal railway line to be defended.  The next day General Pope, who had some time before been detached by Halleck for this