THE FIRST BATTLE OF BULL RUN .

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THE MAIN BATTLE-GROUND.—NO. 2.

View of the Robinson liouse, looking nortli from the left. The foreground was between the centers of thespot on the Henry plateau where General Bee fell. At positions.

1 p. m. this ground lay between the hostile lines, which As these two views are taken from the same spot, thewere (roughly speaking) parallel with the sides of the reader will best understand their relation by holdingpicture : Confederates on the right, Union forces on the the pages at a right angle to each other.

of the Shenandoah forces marching from railroad trains halted en route withthat aim—errors that have been repeated by a number of writers, and byan ambitious but superficial French author.

There were certain sentiments of a personal character clustering about thisfirst battle, and personal anxiety as to its issue, that gladly accepted thistheory. To this may be added the general readiness to accept a sentimentalor ultra-dramatic explanation—a sorcery wrought by the delay or arrival ofsome force, or the death or coming of somebody, or any other single magicalevent—whereby history is easily caught, rather than to seek an understandingof that which is but the gradual result of the operation of many forces, both ofopposing design and actual collision, modified more or less by the falls ofchance. The personal sentiment, though natural enough at the time, has noplace in any military estimate, or place of any kind at this day. The battleof Manassas was, like any other battle, a progression and development from thedeliberate counter-employment of the military resources in hand, affected byaccidents, as always, but of a kind very different from those referred to.My line of battle, which twice had not only withstood the enemy’s attack,but had taken the offensive and driven him back in disorder, was becomingmomentarily stronger from the arrival, at last, of the reenforcements providedfor; and if the enemy had remained on the field till the arrival of Ewell and