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"    Read the Esquire Gettysburg Reenactment series in its entirety here. As a professional officer, I hate the evil that is PowerPoint. It borders on being the bane of my existence. We do horrible damage to ourselves with that tool of the devil on some of the higher-level staffs where I have served. But when I am teaching I cede that the beast can have some utility. Not in flow-charts or graphs or lists of bullet-points, but as a handy tool to display pictures and maps. Pictures and maps are all that a good historian usually needs to tell a story. But even before displays were readily available in university lecture rooms, all I really needed was a bit of chalk and a board. Sometimes even that is not really necessary, since I can show people how to visualize these things themselves. So, let us make a strike against PowerPoint. Let us, you and I, use our imaginations.  I ask of you a simple thing. Just take yourself a piece of paper and draw a box on it, in pencil. That is not difficult, is it?  On the left side, about a quarter of the way from the edge, draw a vertical line from the top to the bottom. Now erase a few random gaps in that line, just three or four, but make sure one is in the middle. Then erase the top bit of it as well. On the extreme right side of the page, half-way up (or down, if you prefer), make a little star. At the bottom of the page, slightly to the right, draw an X. Right above it draw an O.  There, you are done. See how easy that was? You now have everything you need to visualize the entirety of the Gettysburg Campaign. Not the battle itself, mind you, but the bigger picture. It is really not all that complex. People who cover maps with all sorts of squirrely lines sometimes make it look like a lot more, but at the end of the day, well, this is really all you need.  The star is Washington, DC. The X is the Confederate &amp;quot;Army of Northern Virginia&amp;quot; and the O is the Union &amp;quot;Army of the Potomac.&amp;quot; That line with the gaps stands in for the Blue Ridge. What you just drew is how things looked on 1 June 1863. All we will do now is move the X and the O around.  So, the next step is to erase the X and the O and redraw them over to the left. Do this just short of the vertical line, with the X further to the left and the O closer to the center. That was the situation on 9 June 1863, when the Battle of Brandy Station took place. See how easy that was?  If you want to get really fancy you can draw yourself another two Os -- these ones much smaller. Put them on the left side of that vertical line you drew, one about 2/3 of the way down, and one at the mid-point gap in the vertical line. Don&amp;#039;t draw them too heavily though because they are about to go away, violently.  The lower little O sits in a valley, and it is not a very defendable position. On 13 June 1863, that was a very bad place to be. Well, it was if you were a small O anyway. That place was Winchester, and on this day it would change hands, again.  This part of your pencil-drawn map is called the Shenandoah Valley, and over the course of the war it was to change hands more times than you can count. For example, it was in this little patch of defined territory that &amp;quot;Stonewall&amp;quot; Jackson made his name just the year before. And it was up and down this valley that armies would march and counter-march for almost the entire duration of the war. In the end a fellow named Sheridan smacked the place down so bad (it was 1864 and by then nobody was feeling very charitable), that it essentially took most of a decade to recover after the war. But this time, that is to say today, minus 150 years, it was a part of the United States Army that would be destroyed, because the brigadier general in command really did not seem to have a good grasp on things like time, distance, and speed.  There were roughly 20,000 American troops in the valley at the time, and that is not an inconsiderable force. The problem was, they were too spread out. Remember when we talked about the importance of &amp;quot;concentration&amp;quot; the other day? Yeah, it applies to infantry as well as cavalry. The problem was, because they were more or less scattered about through the valley, about 9,000 of those American soldiers were about to pay for that fact at Winchester. We don&amp;#039;t need to get into the weeds about the timing or the directions or any of those details about the fight itself. It was, essentially, a done deal from the word go. U.S. Army Brigadier General Robert Milroy was out at the end of a very long stick, and although (perhaps belatedly) he was told by his boss to move the fk out and get out of there, all he did was send his supply wagons away while he kept the main body of his troops with him. When the commander of Lee&amp;#039;s Second Corps, a decent fellow named Dick Ewell attacked at sunset on the 13th, he did so in spades. All at once, Ewell&amp;#039;s force (which, to be fair, was not that much bigger) hit Milroy from the east, the southeast, the west, and the northwest. Although initial casualties on both sides were light, chaos reigned among the Americans and Milroy decided to up stakes, finally, at around 0200. Too late.  Ewell had his number. He had already placed an entire brigade in ambush a few miles to the north along the route Milroy would have to take, and when Milroy predictably blundered into it, there was hell to pay. By dawn, Milroy was trying to hold together the last 1,500 of his original force of 9,000 men. All the rest were killed, captured, or scattered (soon to be captured) across the countryside. Inside of a few hours an entire American division had, in essence, ceased to exist. Lee had just kicked the door down, and the route to the north, to Maryland and even Pennsylvania, was it now just lying there, hangin from a broken hinge.  So, on your pencil drawn map you can now erase those two little Os. They&amp;#039;re gone (once the first one went the other one, prudently, got out of the way). Put the big X at the bottom of the valley, moving north. As for the big O, the American Army of the Potomac? For the next several days, as you mentally track that big X moving up the left side of the box, just keep repositioning the O so that it is always between the X and the star.  That&amp;#039;s it for this week. Next week, a little about cavalry, some thoughts about context, a touch about command, and perhaps something about knowing your limits.  You can write to me at R_Bateman_LTC@hotmail.com, or I will try, as time permits, to participate in the comments here. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a23056/gettysburg-reenactment-winchester-061313/>