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much so, indeed, was this the case, that
Dana, at eleven o'clock on the 17th, turns again to the subject with the declaration that
The general organization of this army is inefficient, and its discipline defective.
The former proceeds from the fact that General Rosecrans insists on personally directing every department, and keeps every one waiting and uncertain till he himself can directly supervise every operation.
The latter proceeds from his utter lack of firmness, his passion for universal applause, and his incapacity to hurt any man's feelings by just severity. . . . There is thus practically no discipline for superior officers, and, of course, the evil, though less pernicious in the lower grades, is everywhere perceptible.
On the 18th, although it was raining again, there was hope for the final cessation of the storm.
Meanwhile [Dana adds] our condition and prospects grow worse and worse.
The roads are in such a state that wagons are eight days making the journey from Stevenson to Chattanooga, and some which left on the 10th have not yet arrived.
Though subsistence stores are so nearly exhausted here, the wagons are compelled to throw overboard portions of their precious cargo in order to get through at all. The returning trains have now, for some days, been stopped on this side of the Sequatchie, and a civilian who reached here last night states that he saw fully five hundred teams halted between the mountain and the river, without forage for the animals, and unable to move in any direction.
I rode through the camps here yesterday, and can testify that my previous reports respecting the starvation of the battery horses were not exaggerated.
A few days more and most of them will be dead. ... It does not seem possible to hold out here another week without a new avenue of supplies. . . . Amid all this the practical incapacity of the general commanding is astonishing, and it often seems difficult
