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[233] and which were followed without order by rapidly increasing groups of stragglers. Most of them only reached the encampments which had been designated for them in the middle of the night; others stopped on the road, and only the heads of columns were able to resume their march on the morning of the 17th. The remainder, already prostrated by fatigue, slowly followed in their tracks. Bonham's brigade was thus allowed time to fall back quietly by way of Centreville, and to take position at Mitchell's Ford, on the line of Bull Run, where Beauregard was posting his troops. On the evening of the 17th three divisions of the Federal army were in the neighborhood of Fairfax, while Heintzelman, with the fourth, occupied Sangster's Station on the railway. They had marched about twenty-four kilometres in two days; but this march, too severe for a beginning, had proved very exhausting; the soldiers, improvident in their inexperience, had wasted the rations they carried; the supply-trains had not come up, and most of them lay down that night under the leafy cover of the forest without even a biscuit to eat. The provisions, which only left Alexandria when they should already have arrived at Fairfax, required time to reach the army. Having ordered Tyler simply to occupy Centreville, which was only eight kilometers distant from the point where he had passed the night, McDowell proceeded to his left to prepare for the movement he had planned by way of Union Mills. On that side, while his troops were rallying, resting, and still waiting for supplies, Heintzelman was reconnoitring the course of Bull Run and trying to find a passage suitable for the attack. But none was found; the approaches to the river were almost everywhere impracticable; and, giving up his project, McDowell determined to try the enemy in another direction. But the impatience and unreflecting confidence of a few chiefs, which were as much the natural result of inexperience as the slowness and disorder of the march on the part of the soldiers, were to compromise the success of the campaign from the outset. Having found Centreville evacuated, Tyler thought, no doubt, that the whole expedition would amount to nothing more than a mere military promenade, and was anxious to secure for himself, in the eyes of the public, the cheap merit of having been
Philadelphia, Jos. H. Coates and co., 1876.
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