War & Peace Quote by John Bigelow

Military prose rarely sounds this anxious while pretending to be calm. Bigelow is writing in the keyed-up register of someone reporting up the chain, trying to make decisions look premeditated rather than improvised. The sentence is basically a performance of competence: "indefatigable labor from early dawn" flatters the recipient (or the commander being described) as tireless, vigilant, already on the clock while others sleep. That phrase isn’t just praise; it’s insulation. If the day goes badly, the groundwork is laid for a defense: we worked, we watched, we anticipated.

The real tell is the fussy specificity of "explicit instructions" and the tactical detail about batteries reserving ammunition until the "grand charge". Bigelow is signaling procedural rigor, a paper trail in sentence form. "Explicit" is doing legal work here, which makes sense for a lawyer: it preemptively answers the accusation that orders were unclear, that units fired too soon, that resources were squandered. It’s accountability language smuggled into battlefield narrative.

Then comes the psychological hinge: "for which the enemy were undoubtedly preparing". "Undoubtedly" is both confidence and conjecture. It casts the opponent as predictable and the writer’s side as rationally responsive, even if the intelligence is thin. In the mid-19th-century American context, that mix of certainty and supposition fits a moment when communication was slow, fog of war was total, and reputations were made or ruined in the after-action telling. Bigelow’s intent isn’t only to describe events; it’s to author the version of events that will survive.