For the rest, being a staff-officer, he was kept busy and rode hundreds of extra miles through the rain.  It was a large army, as inexperienced as it was large, and it stood in great need of being kept in contact with itself.  If you lived at one end of it and wanted to know what was going on at the other end, you had to travel about as far as from New York to New Haven.  The army proper, marching by fours, stretched away through the wet lands for forty miles.  A fly-bitten tail of ambulances and wagons, with six miserable horses or six perfectly happy mules attached to each, added another twenty miles.  At the not always attained rate of fifteen miles a day the army could pass a given point in four days.  To the gods in Olympus it would have appeared to have all the characteristic color and shape of an angleworm, without, however, enjoying that reptile’s excellent good health.  If the armies of Washington, Cornwallis, Clive, Pizarro, Cortes, and Christian de Wet had been added to it, they would have passed unnoticed in the crowd.  And the recurring fear of the general in command of this army was that the army he sought would prove to be twice as big.  So speculation was active between the York and James rivers.

In the minds of the soldiers a thousand years passed, and then there was a little fight, and they learned that they were soldiers.  And so did the other army.  Another thousand years passed, and it seemed tactful to change bases.  Accordingly, that which had been arduously established on a muddy river called the Chickahominy (and it was very far from either of those two good things) was forsaken, and the host began to be moved toward the James.  This move would have been more smoothly accomplished if the enemy had not interfered.  They, however, insisted upon making history, turning a change of base into a nominal retreat, and begetting in themselves a brass-bound and untamable spirit which it took vast wealth and several years to humble.  From Gaines’s Mill to the awful brow of Malvern Hill there were thunder and death.  Forty thousand men were somewhat needlessly killed, wounded, or (as one paradoxical account has it) “found missing.”

Aladdin missed the fight at Malvern Hill and became wounded in a non-bellicose fashion.  His general desired to make a remark to another general, and writing it on a piece of thin yellow paper, gave it to him to deliver.  He rode off to the tune of axes,—­for a Maine regiment was putting in an hour in undoing the stately work of a hundred years,—­trotted fifteen miles peacefully enough, delivered his general’s remark, and started back.  Then came night and a sticky mist.  Then the impossibility of finding the way.  Aladdin rode on and on, courageously if not wisely, and came in time to the dimly discernible outbuildings of a Virginia mansion.  They stood huddled dark and wet in the mist, which was turning to rain, and there was no sign of life in or about them.  Aladdin passed them and turned into an