Sorry for being a bit gruff myself. I was just trying to make clear that the author who referred to "meeting the elephant" clearly had a dif understanding of the phrase than you and I do. It's on page xiv of Andrew Ward's River Run Red.
Ah, it's a modern author, so there's a chance he could simply have gotten it wrong. In a period book, at least one could say it's evidence of how at least one quirky person in the period used it.
http://books.google.com/books?id=LLZ3KboxDBwC
"The men who served in the Civil War called going into battle 'meeting the elephant.' No one knows exactly why. Perhaps, from a distance, the smoke roiling up from a battle resembled an elephant, but it seems to me just as likely that they could have been referring to the old saw about the blind men and the elephant, each feeling a small portion and none able to describe the beast as a whole."
I'd chalk it up to the author being a military historian but not an etymologist, and so reaching outside his field for a bit of poetic talk about a phrase he didn't quite remember right.
Here's some discussion on "To see the elephant" from Bartlett's Dictionary of Americanisms, 1860:
http://books.google.com/books?id=6EfnQ2HMU9QC&pg=PA392
There's lots more at the link, but Bartlett puts emphasis on the cynical use of the phrase: "to undergo any disappointment of high-raised expectations... For instance, men who volunteered for the Mexican war, expecting to reap lots of glory and enjoyment, but who instead found only sickness, fatigue, privations, and suffering, were said to have 'seen the elephant.'"
That fits with how I've seen it used during the Civil War, with the implication that a person was going to see what he'd only heard exciting stories about before, so that's why it fit best with a person's
first experience in battle.
After the war, 1870, the phrase had spread and morphed: "the phrase means to have seen all and to know everything, and is now as current in England as in America." From
http://books.google.com/books?id=C-wIAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA681
Again, it fits with Civil War veterans telling/asking each other about seeing the elephant, and once having understood war first-hand, being more experienced and jaded.
"Meeting the elephant" just doesn't seem to be a common period phrase, though I'm sure someone somewhere in the period said it as a variation on the usual phrase.