This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
JOSEPH E. JOHNSTON
21

larly scrupulous and accurate. Some careful critics have denied this. Thus his deduction of Sherman's losses from the burials in Marietta Cemetery has been shown to be altogether wrong because many of those burials were of soldiers who never belonged to Sherman's army at all.55

Again, General Palfrey, usually so impartial, declares: "The more I study Johnston's writings, the more cause I find to mistrust them. I like to believe in him; but I cannot do so absolutely, for I find that he permits himself great freedom in asserting what he does not know to be true." 56

The freedom and looseness of statement spring from Johnston's dogmatic temper, from his energy and decision, his practical incapacity for seeing more than his own side and point of view; and the dogmatism and the energy lend double bitterness to the slurs which he is constantly flinging at the man who had been his leader, for better and for worse, and who—at least, so it seems to me—should have been respected for the sake of a noble cause and a vanished ideal. "Under such circumstances his accusation is, to say the least, very discreditable." 57 "It is not easy to reconcile the increase of my command by the President, with his very numerous disparaging notices of me." 58 "Such an occurrence [explosion of buried shells] must have been known to the whole army, but it was not; so it must have been a dream of the writer."59 "These are fancies. He arrived upon the field after the last armed enemy had left it, when none