6oo Revieii's of Books bandits and marauders, and a great many people still so understand it. Nor is it at all accurate to liken the operations of the raiding cavalry of the Confederacy to the guerilla warfare at one time conducted in certain countries of Europe. The resemblance, if there be any, is too slight to be considered ; and that the term is used as one of reproach is best shown by the fact that Mr. Fiske never employs it in describing similar service performed by the Federal cavalry. He is guilty of a similar "unjust discrimination," when he charac- terizes Albert Pike as "an adventurer from Massachusetts." Pike migrated to Arkansas when barely twenty-one years old, and had lived in the South for thirty years when the Civil War began. He was eminent at the bar and in many ways, was a man of high character and social position, and was perfectly convinced of the justice of the cause for which he fought. It maybe that the appellation of "rebel" is properly be- stowed on all who served the Confederacy, whether born in the North or the South, but there is uo more reason to style Albert Pike "an adven- turer from Massachusetts," than to term General George H. Thomas an adventurer from Virginia. So seldom, however, does Mr. Fiske err in this regard and so venial are his lapses from a really impartial account of the events he relates, that we might not observe them if the general tone of his narration were not so free from acrimony and any trace of illiberal temper that the slightest suggestion of such feeling, upon his part, jars us more than bucketsful of abuse from some other war-historians. While one who has himself seen service in the field may detect in this book evidences of the lack of such experience in its author, it is quite as true that no mere soldier could have written it nearly so well. This is not simply because of the vivid, graphic, picturesque style in which the story is told, and the absence of that dry, technical and unnecessary detail which makes so much of purely military narrative tedious and difficult of appreciative attention, but because of the very lucid and comprehensive method in which the subject matter is presented. A very large subject, embracing a number of parts having a close but not apparent connection, is treated with a logical arrangement and power of explicit statement which only an unusually acute and incisive writer, accustomed to consider and discuss a great variety of topics, could com- mand. Mr. Fiske's previous studies and work in other departments of literature, were unquestionably of value to him when he undertook the task of military criticism. The book is a story, as its title imports, of military operations during the Civil War in the states of Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana, conducted in a field stretching from the Ohio and Missouri rivers to the Gulf, and from the Mississippi river to the western prairies, in the one direction, and to the mountains of east Ten- nessee in the other. It describes the embryonic organization on both sides, and the partially purposeless, totally futile effort put forth by each in the beginning of the conflict. It recites the earlier struggles of raw,
