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After the capture of the second line in front of Loos, "X" and "Y" Brigades separated, "Y" surrounding the village with two battalions, while the rest captured the village and cleaned it up. It was stiff street fighting, the Germans being hidden away in all sorts of corners with plenty of machine guns. The Scots made a quick job of it, not stopping for trifles.
The two Georgia brigades, a Mississippi brigade, and a South Carolina brigade, composed mostly of the first volunteers from their respective States, needed as a commander a hotspur like our own J.B. Kershaw.
There they were formed into a new division, the 4th, the brigades being given to Howard and Knox, and the command to Lyttelton, who had returned his former division, the second, to Clery. The 5th and 6th brigades were also formed into one division, the 10th, which was placed under the capable command of Hunter, who had confirmed in the south the reputation which he had won in the north of Africa.
Macdonald has arrived, I believe, or is arriving, and there are various other brigades and divisions casting up from different quarters, all concentrating on unhappy Cronjé. Lord Roberts, I suppose, will get the credit, but part of it, one would think, belongs to Kitchener, who planned the movement and put it in train before Lord Roberts arrived.
I directed my several brigades to resume at once their original camps. Several times during the battle, cartridges gave out; but General Grant had thoughtfully kept a supply coming from the rear. When I appealed to regiments to stand fast, although out of cartridges, I did so because, to retire a regiment for any cause, has a bad effect on others.
All the brigades knew his trouble by that time, and an easy breath was drawn by his entertainers when he left the house with knife still sheathed. In the wilderness the will of a brigade commander was law; but when the voyageur was out of the Fur Company's yard in Mackinac his own will was law.
General Buell immediately set about reorganizing the whole force, and on September 29 issued an order designating the troops under my command as the Eleventh Division, Army of the Ohio, and assigning Brigadier-General J. T. Boyle to command the division, and me to command one of its brigades.
It was little grief, as can be imagined, that the events of the next few weeks brought to Greenwood; and the day the news came that Washington's force had been outflanked and successfully driven from its position on the hills of Brooklyn, with a loss of two of its best brigades, the squire was so jubilant that nothing would do but to have up a bottle of his best Madeira, a wine hitherto never served except to guests of distinction.
Zebulon B. Vance, the newly elected Governor of North Carolina and an anti-Davis man, said to the Legislature: "It is mortifying to find entire brigades of North Carolina soldiers commanded by strangers, and in many cases our own brave and war-worn colonels are made to give place to colonels from distant States."
The main American force was still in winter quarters in northern New Jersey, near New York. Various brigades were stationed up and down the Hudson as far as West Point. As at the beginning of the war, so now in 1779, the line of the Hudson from Albany to New York was the key to the general situation. Its protection, as Washington had written, was of "infinite consequence to our cause."
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