Dick also observed with extreme interest the ground upon which they were encamped and the country surrounding it.  There was the deep Tennessee, still swollen by spring rains, upon the left bank of which they lay, with the stream protecting one flank.  In the river were some of the gunboats which had been of such value to Grant.  All about them was rough, hilly country, almost wholly covered with brushwood and tall forest.  There were three deep creeks, given significant names by the pioneers.  Lick Creek flowed to the south of them into the Tennessee, and Owl Creek to the north sought the same destination.  A third, Snake Creek, was lined with deep and impassable swamps to its very junction with the river.

Some roads of the usual frontier type ran through this region, and at a point within the Northern lines stood a little primitive log church that they called Shiloh.  It was of the kind that the pioneers built everywhere as they moved from the Atlantic to the Pacific.  Shiloh belonged to a little body of Methodists.  Dick went into it more than once.  There was no pastor and no congregation now, but the little church was not molested.  He sat more than once on an uncompromising wooden bench, and looked out through a window, from which the shutter was gone, at the forest and the army.

Sitting here in this primitive house of worship, he would feel a certain sadness.  It seemed strange that a great army, whose purpose was to destroy other armies, should be encamped around a building erected in the cause of the Prince of Peace.  The mighty and terrible nature of the war was borne in upon him more fully than ever.

But optimism was supreme among the soldiers.  They had achieved the great victory of Donelson in the face of odds that had seemed impossible.  They could defeat all the Southern forces that lay between them and the Gulf.  The generals shared their confidence.  They did not fortify their camp.  They had not come that far South to fight defensive battles.  It was their place to attack and that of the men in gray to defend.  They had advanced in triumph almost to the Mississippi line, and they would soon be pursuing their disorganized foe into that Gulf State.

Several new generals came to serve under Grant.  Among them was one named Sherman, to whom Dick bore messages several times, and who impressed him with his dry manner and curt remarks which were yet so full of sense.

It was Sherman’s division, in fact, that was encamped around the little church, and Dick soon learned his opinions.  He did not believe that they would so easily conquer the South.  He did not look for any triumphal parade to the Gulf.  In the beginning of the war he had brought great enmity and criticism upon himself by saying that 200,000 men at least would be needed at once to crush the Confederacy in the west alone.  And yet it was to take more than ten times that number four bitter years to achieve the task in both west and east.