Excerpt from General George H. Thomas: A Critical Biography Reports of battles, then, were to the people as much stories from the unknown as Stanley's tales of a dark conti nent. Not only this, but the hearers had no information by which to test their truth or probability. A most ludicrous instance of this occurs when General Sheridan's army was surprised and defeated by General Early. The commander was asleep in bed at Winchester, twenty miles away. He would have been called to account for thus ahsenting him self from the front at a time of great peril to his forces from the immediate presence of the enemy, and had to answer to a court of inquiry or a court-martial, but for a crazy poet and a patriotic actor. The very dereliction of duty was made the basis of a rhymed eulogy, and instead of being tried for willful absence, he was glorified by the mob and promoted by the administration. The returning general is pictured as galloping back to the roar and rumble of a ter rific fight and meeting his entire army in full flight. Ac cording to the wild fancy of the rhymester, he alone rallies the panic-stricken thirty thousand and turns them back to victory. The prosaic fact is, that General Wright had re formed the broken lines and was actually moving into battle when Sheridan returned. The fight was made and won without half of the army knowing that General Sheridan was present. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.