Page "belles_lettres" Paragraph 968

Sherman proved that a railway base could be movable and the most brilliant feature of the Atlanta campaign was the rapid repair of the tracks.

To the Rebels it seemed as if Sherman carried tunnels and bridges in his pockets.

The whistle of Sherman's locomotives often drowned out the rattle of the skirmish fire.

As always, the ranks worked out new and better tactics, but there was brilliance in the way the field commands adopted these methods and in the way the army commanders incorporated them into their military thinking.

The fossilized, formalized, precedent-based thinking of the legendary military brain was not evident in Sherman's armies.

Sherman could never be accused of sticking too long with the old.