It is praise not
to be pitched into by the Great Peppery: and he is very kind to me. To be
sure, I watch him, as one would a big trout on a small hook, and those who
don't, catch volleys at all hours! Poor Biddle, for instance, an excellent,
bettyish sort of man, with no fragment of tact, when the General is full of
anxiety for something that is not going right, is sure to come in, in his
stuttering way, with “Ah, aw, hem, aw, General, they are going to pitch camp in
a very sandy, bad place, sir; you will not be at all comfortable, and there is
a nice grassy —” “Major Bid dle!!!” — and
then follows the volley. Sometimes it is very effective to contradict the
General, provided you stick to it and are successful. I came in last night,
feeling cross and not at all caring for commanders of armies or other great
ones of this earth. “Well, Lyman, you're back, are you?” “Yes, sir: I reported
that the enemy were moving along our rear, but they got no further than —” “Rear!
not at all! they were moving along the front.” “No, sir, they were not, they
were moving along our rear.” “What do you mean by that? There is Russell, and
there is Ricketts, and here is Wheaton; now of course that's your front.” “Russell
isn't in such a position, sir, nor Wheaton either. They face so (dabs with a
pencil), so that is our rear and can't be anything else.” Whereupon the
good chief graciously said no more. I do not know that he ever said anything
pleasant about me except the day after the Wilderness battles, when I heard
Hancock say that “Colonel Lyman had been useful to him, the day before.” To
which the General replied: “Yes, Lyman is a clearheaded man.” I have heard him
volunteer several favorable things about Captain Sanders; also he has remarked
that Old Rosey (my tent-mate) was good at finding roads; and that is pretty
much all of his praises, whereof no man is more sparing. By the way, old Rosey
has his commission as captain. One thing I do not like — it is serious —
and that is, that three years of bitter experience have failed to show our home
people that, to an army on active campaign (or rather furious campaign), there
must be supplied a constant stream of fresh men — by thousands. What do we see?
Everyone trying to persuade himself that his town has furnished its “quota.”
But where are they? We have large armies, but nothing compared with the
paper statements. No! The few produced by drafts in good part run away; so too
many of the “volunteers” — miserable fellows bought with money. None are shot —
that is unmerciful — but the Powers that Be will let brave, high-toned men, who
scorn to shirk their duty, be torn with canister and swept away with musketry,
and that is inevitable.
This morning
appeared General Grant with two French officers, who since have taken up their
quarters with us and mess with us. They are two artillery officers, the elder a
Colonel de Chanal, the other a Captain Guzman, both sent as a commission to
observe the progress of the campaign. The Colonel is a perfect specimen of an
old Frenchman, who has spent most of his life in provincial garrisons, in the
study of all sorts of things, from antiquities down to rifled projectiles. He
has those extraordinary, nervous legs, which only middle-aged Frenchmen can
get, and is full of various anecdotes. Many years he has lived in Toulouse. The
other is young and little and looks like a black-eyed and much astonished
grasshopper. He is very bright, speaks several languages, and was on the
Chinese expedition. General Grant staid some time in council, and took dinner
with us. I was amused at him, for, the day being warm, he began taking off his
coat before he got to the tent; and by the time he had said, “How are you,
Meade?” he was in his shirt-sleeves, in which state he remained till
dinner-time. He attempted no foreign conversation with the Gauls, simply
observing; “If I could have turned the class the other end to, I should have
graduated at West Point, very high in French!”
SOURCE: George R. Agassiz, Editor, Meade’s
Headquarters, 1863-1865: Letters of Colonel Theodore Lyman from the Wilderness
to Appomattox, p. 176-8
