Free A Stillness at Appomattox by Bruce Catton Page B

unload food and forage, uniforms and blankets, and shelter tents and munitions. Men found that they were working harder now than in the past. Subtly but unmistakably, an air of competence and preparation was manifest.
    Cavalry found that a new day had dawned. The Pleason tons and Kilpatricks were gone, and at the top there was another Westerner—a tough little man named Phil Sheridan, bandy-legged and wiry, with a black bullet head and a hard eye, wearing by custom a mud-spotted uniform, flourishing in one fist a flat black hat which, when he put it on, seemed to be at least two sizes too small for him. Like Grant, he rode a great black horse when he made his rounds and he rode it at a pounding gallop, and it was remarked that he "rolled and bounced upon the back of his steed much as an old salt does when walking up the aisle of a church after a four years* cruise at sea."
    Cavalry's camps were better policed, the endless picket details were reduced, and it appeared that Sheridan was going to insist on using his corps as a compact fighting unit. When Sheridan was taken to the White House to meet the President, Lincoln quoted the familiar army jest—"Who ever saw a dead cavalryman?"—and it was obvious that Sheridan was not amused. Meeting a friend at Willard's a little bit later, Sheridan said: "I'm going to take the cavalry away from the bobtailed brigadier generals. They must do without their escorts. I intend to make the cavalry an arm of the service."
    One trooper complained that people now were checking up on all routine jobs, so that a man grooming his horse had to put in a full sixty minutes at its "There is an officer watching you all the time, and if you stop he yells out, 'Keep to work 9 there!"' With all of this came businesslike new weapons? seven-shot Spencer magazine carbines, made regulation equipment by a recently revived Cavalry Bureau. 15
    Artillerists were put through endless maneuvers, wheeling back and forth in the dust and mud to become letter-perfect in such intricacies as "changing front to the right on the first section," and banging away in constant target practice. Batteries were taught to come galloping up to a line, halt and unlimber, completely disassemble their pieces until wheels, guns, gun carriages, and limber chests lay separate on the ground, then at a word of command reassemble the whole business and go galloping away again. One gunner declared that a good gun crew could perform the whole maneuver in several seconds less than one minute, and another grumbled that all of this "was of as much practical use to us as if we had been assiduously drilled to walk on stilts"; and whether it was useful or otherwise the drill was repeated over and over and the gun crews got toughened up for the approaching campaign. 16
    None of this, naturally, missed the infantry. There were unending drills, and much target practice. The army command had caught on to the notorious fact that some soldiers simply did not know how to shoot. On every battlefield, ordnance officers had collected hundreds of discarded muskets containing anywhere from two to a dozen unexploded cartridges. In the heat of battle men failed to notice that they had not pulled trigger, and reloaded weapons which had not been fired; or, indeed, they were so untaught that they did not even know enough to cap their pieces and so pulled trigger to no effect, failing to realize in all the battle racket that they had not actually fired. A circular from headquarters decreed that every man in the army should be made to load and fire his weapon under supervision of an officer, since "it is believed there are men in this army who have been in numerous actions without ever firing their guns." 17
    The bark of the drill sergeant echoed across the hard-trodden parade grounds where new levies were being put into shape. (In the Irish Brigade, an irate non-com was heard shouting: "Kape your heels together, Tim Mullaney in the rear rank, and don't be standing