match for both. The only chance of prolonging anything more than
a mere guerilla war was to join forces in southwest Virginia,
where the only line of rails was safe from capture for the
moment. But this meant eluding Grant and Sherman; and these two
leaders would never let a plain chance slip. They took good care
that all Confederate forces outside the central scene of action
were kept busy with their own defense. They also closed in enough
men from the west to prevent Lee and Johnston escaping by the
mountains. Then, with the help of the navy, having cut off every
means of escape--north, south, east, and west--they themselves
closed in for the death-grip.

By the first of February Sherman was on his way north through the
Carolinas with sixty thousand picked men, drawing in
reinforcements as he advanced against Johnston's dwindling forty
thousand, until the thousands that faced each other at the end in
April were ninety and thirty respectively. On the ninth of
February (the day Lee became Commander-in-Chief) Sherman was
crossing the rails between Charleston and Augusta, of course
destroying them. A week later he was doing the same at Columbia
in the middle of South Carolina. By this time his old antagonist,
Johnston, had assumed command; so that he had to reckon with the
chances of a battle, as on his way against Atlanta, and not only
with the troubles of devastating an undefended base, as on his
march to the sea. The difficulties of hard marching through an
enemy country full of natural and artificial obstacles were also
much greater here than in Georgia. How well these difficulties
could be surmounted by a veteran army may be realized from a
recorded instance which, though it occurred elsewhere, was yet
entirely typical. In forty days an infantry division of eight