The ambulance corps increases the strength of the army a little by carrying along the weary who may still have strength enough to fight, but these are few. They are rare cases where a sick man leaves the ambulances to take part in a battle. The number of men which these details take from the battle-field exceed these many hundred times.

There are, in my opinion, but two ways to look at an ambulance train in actual warfare-first, as an incumbrance, and second, as a humanly institution, and the only question is how far we can afford to use the one for the sake of the other. That it is an incumbrance cannot be doubted, and I maintain that no mere medical officer can form a proper appreciation of how great a one it may be made, and how vitally it may affect the success of the corps to which it is attached. War itself is not a humanly institution; it compels us to endure suffering ourselves, to inflict greater on our enemy. Its object is to inflict the greatest injury to an enemy with the least to ourselves, and thus succeed. To introduce anything into an army organization as an act of humanity in a way to imperil its success would be to defeat the object of warfare, and make it a proceeding of unmitigated cruelty.

The full ambulance corps of the army corps, as at present constituted, will occupy as much space on a road as one of its divisions. The artillery of a corps occupies about as much more, and the ammunition nearly as much more; that is, the three trains together occupying as much space as the whole corps. To mix them up with the infantry on the road thus stretches them out twice their front of battle, and dilutes their strength one-half at one point. The confusion produced by the effort of these trains to escape from the lines when the enemy attacks is enough to disorganize any troops but the very staunchest. These trains had, in my opinion, a most important influence on the conduct of the Eleventh Corps at Chancellorsville, which I was present to witness. To put the wagons in large groups would leave places in the column without any defense, and an attack of the enemy at such a point would cut the column in two and destroy entirely the control of the commander over one part or the other of his army, and probably prove disastrous.

Such was the attack made on me at Bristoe, October 14, that if I had had my whole ambulance and ammunition train with me, or if the assault had fallen on the part of the column where the little I had was, I should have been beaten. I am aware that this argument is somewhat against our ammunition and artillery trains, as well as ambulances, and I think they, too, are in excess. But the (especially the artillery) are necessary to the fighting strength of the army; but the ambulances and ammunition trains were the source of the greatest solicitude to me on the march from Auburn to Bristle; to save them they nearly occasioned my having to fight Ewell's corps in an unfavorable position, unaided, at Auburn; and but for these trains and those of the rest of the army at Bretsville I need not have had the engagement at Bristoe, and which, though it, by great good fortune, was a success, was a narrow escape from disaster; it was giving battle with a small detachment of an army at the chosen point of concentration by a skillful enemy. As it was, nothing but darkness enabled me to withdraw, and without that, or the timely arrival of the rest of our army, we should have been destroyed. I detail this to show what an important part these incumbrance may take in the operations of an army. Exam-