without any military experience, who found themselves at once in the face of the enemy, and involved in all the complications of the organization, instruction, equipment, and maneuvering in actual war, of a corps whose dud and novel, and in the management of which they could have for guidance neither the advice of skillful officers nor rules laid down in books.

The armies were immense and new. They were sometimes concentrated and sometimes scattered. The changes of command and of organization were frequent. Signal parties were put upon duty, or relieved from duty, and the members returned to the line, at the will of various generals, sometimes by proper authority, sometimes by authority ignorantly assumed. Telescopes and signal equipments were turned in, by order to quartermasters and to officers not responsible to this office. They cannot now be traced.

The parties became so reduced and so situated that it seed as if they must be ineffective. They have been saved from being so by the exertions of the few officers left upon the duty and by the wisdom of the senior generals.

The order of the Secretary of War (Numbers 68) issued June 18, 1862,* produced here, as in the Eastern departments, good effects.

The recently threatened rebel attacks upon the river towns, which caused the services of signal officers to be anxiously sought for, and a subsequent order of the General-in-Chief of the Army in reference to the organization of signal parties in the Department of the West, have placed the service in these departments in an improved position. It can be rendered there as effective as in the East.

The reports show that with all the obstacles the detachments of the Signal Corps in these departments, were represented by officers who did some little service at the battle of Shiloh; that to the labors of some of its members is greatly due the success of the perfectly combined operations of the land and naval forces at the fort at Saint Charles, White River; that a party served with the forces under General Morgan recently hemmed in at Cumberland Gap, in a manner to meet the approbation of that general; while at the late battle at Chaplin Hills, near Perryville, Ky., the officers of the corps with General C. C. Gilbert and General Rousseau secured the commendation of those officers.

THE DUTIES OF SIGNAL OFFICERS.

The duties of signal officers have been those of reconnaissance and of communication.

The reconnaissance have had the advantage of being, in part, telescopic. It is the duty of signal officers to select those points from which the force and movements of the enemy can be best seen and there to be always on the watch. They are equipped with powerful glasses.

They have been instructed to report by courier, when the report could not be better made, every fact of value within their observation.

The communication, simply, has been when commanders have wished to dispatch, by signals, between islands; or over water of impassable country: between distant points on shore; or between land and naval forces co-operating; or between the vessels of a fleet.

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*See p. 162.

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