half that of the officers; and of the officers of the department alluded to, instead of a majority, not one-fourth took the side of the Confederacy.
So much for preliminary remarks. Let us see whether there is any improvement when the Count gets fairly into the field, where it is claimed that he has the advantage of narrating either as an eye-witness himself, or from the immediate testimony of eye-witnesses.
As regards the first important engagement of the war, that of the 21st July, 1861, he represents the Confederate force to have actually exceeded that of the Federals. Now, we have General Beauregard's official statement, from which the estimate here given does not vary materially, that his whole force, including the army of the Shenandoah, amounted to 30,161 men of all arms. But by the testimony of Federal officers before the "Committee on the Conduct of the War," it appears that General McDowell had five divisions, numbering from ten to twelve thousand men, exclusive of cavalry and artillery. His force, therefore, cannot according to this be fairly estimated at less than 55,000 or 60,000 men. General Johnston, moreover, in his calm, considerate and remarkably nonpartisan-like narrative, estimates the Federal numbers on the field at "about two to one compared with the Confederates at four o'clock, and four to one at noon; at eleven o'clock," he says, "the disparity of numbers was much greater." So much for the respective numbers of the opposing armies and of the forces actually engaged at different stages of the conflict.
We have not space to dwell upon the various errors of detail that adorn the chapter devoted to the first battle of Manassas, as, for example, the evident confusion in the writer's mind as regards the command-in-chief of the Confederates; the ridiculous mistake about the "old road called Braddock road, because it had been constructed by General Braddock during the War of Independence;" the absurd over-statement of Evans' force at the Stone bridge—a statement, however, which, as usual, he himself proceeds in the course of the next few pages to contradict, reducing it to about one-tenth of his original estimate by a single stroke of the pen; and the whole grossly inaccurate account of Kirby Smith's arrival on the field: all very appropriately closing with the singular assertion that "the rout, or in other words, the panic" of the Federal army "was one of those accidents to which even victorious armies are sometimes liable," Our author himself can scarcely be expected
