Burnside's "twenty-odd cars" were confined
to a section of the railroad less than eighty miles long, and could
hardly carry the necessary baggage and ammunition even for that
fraction of the way. The troops must march, and could not by any
physical possibility make a quarter of the distance before
Rosecrans's fate at Chickamauga should be decided. The authorities
at Washington must bear the responsibility for complete ignorance of
these conditions, or, what would be equally bad, a forgetfulness of
them in a moment of panic.
But Burnside did not know and could not guess that a battle was to
be fought so soon. All he could do was to prepare to carry out the
wishes of the War Department as speedily as could be, without the
total ruin of East Tennessee and all he had accomplished. Such ruin
might come by the fate of war if he were driven out by superior
force, but he would have been rightly condemned if it had come by
his precipitate abandonment of the country. He did more to carry out
Halleck's wish than was quite prudent. He stopped the troops which
had not yet reached Greeneville and ordered a countermarch. He
hastened up the country to make the attack upon the Confederates
with the force he already had in their presence, and then to bring
the infantry back at once, hoping the cavalry could hold in check a
defeated enemy.
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