There was now a good opportunity of exercising it in the battalion drill.

While I was at West Point the tactics used in the army had been Scott's and the musket the flint lock.

I had never looked at a copy of tactics from the time of my graduation.

My standing in that branch of studies had been near the foot of the class.

In the Mexican war in the summer of 1846, I had been appointed regimental quartermaster and commissary and had not been at a battalion drill since.