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Personal Recollections of Distinguished Generals

Chapter 13: INDEX.
By William Franklin Gore Shanks
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About This Book

A series of candid sketches of prominent military leaders combines close personal observation, anecdotes, and critical appraisal to reveal habitual traits, temperaments, and command styles. The author contrasts bold strategists noted for large-scale maneuvers with methodical tacticians praised for imperturbability, and profiles persistent, practical commanders, cavalry officers, and outspoken critics. Chapters address battlefield conduct, organizational habits, private vices and virtues, and disputed decisions, aiming to portray officers off parade rather than as idealized icons. The tone mixes admiration and criticism while highlighting incidents and judgments that official reports left untold.

If Napoleon could revisit the "glimpses of the moon," he would doubtless laugh—perhaps his nephew really does laugh at the idea of our calling the victors of this short-lived rebellion "veterans"—or with that sternness with which he once reproved his marine secretary, Truget, for propagating "the dangerous opinion that a soldier could be trained to all his duties in six months," the first Napoleon would ask us, with a look of imperial scorn, to show him in our boasted army a corps like the eighteen thousand troops of the French Monarchy that under his discipline became the Old Guard, which "died, but never surrendered." Julius Cæsar would doubtless smile at our presumption, and point to the old veteran legions of his armies with which he overran Europe, and into which no recruit was admitted until after eight years' service and discipline in other ranks, and ask us for veterans like his. Our soldiers were not, perhaps, the veterans for Napoleon or Cæsar, nor for such purpose as those of Napoleon or Cæsar, but they were such veterans as perished with Leonidas at Thermopylæ, and won victory in following Arnold Yon Wilkenried in the mountain passes of Switzerland. Nothing can be sublimer than the patient heroism displayed by the veterans of the "War for the Union;" and when Time shall have hallowed, as it will, the yet familiar scenes of that struggle, tinting the story with a hue of romance, rounding the irregularities in the characters of the leaders, and toning down the rude points in the characters of the men, forgetting their excesses and remembering only their devotion and daring, the heroes and veterans who fought for the unity of the land will loom up as sacred in our eyes as are those who, in ages past, fought for its independence and liberty.

INDEX.