d so
necessary a part of the organization, that he was retained in it
against his wishes, to the end of the war, each commander of the
Army of the Potomac in turn finding that he was indispensable.
[Footnote: I have discussed this subject also in a review of
Henderson's Stonewall Jackson, "The Nation," Nov. 24, 1898, p. 396.]

The Confederate army suffered from straggling quite as much,
perhaps, as ours, but in a somewhat different way. At the close of
the Antietam campaign General Lee made bitter complaints in regard
to it, and asked the Confederate government for legislation which
would authorize him to apply the severest punishments. As the
Confederate stragglers were generally in the midst of friends, where
they could sleep under shelter and get food of better quality than
the army ration, this grew to be the regular mode of life with many
even of those who would join their comrades in an engagement. They
were not reported in the return of "effectives" made by their
officers, but that they often made part of the killed, wounded, and
captured I have little doubt. In this way a rational explanation may
be found of the larger discrepancies between the Confederate reports
of casualties and ours of their dead buried and prisoners taken.

The weather during this brief campaign was as lovely as possible,
and the contrast between the rich farming country in which we now
were, and the forest-covered mountains of West Virginia to which we
had been accustomed, was very striking. An evening march, under a
brilliant moon, over a park-like landscape with alternations of
groves and meadows which could not have been more beautifully
composed by a master artist, remains in my memory as a page out of a
lovely romance. On the day that we marched to Leesboro, Lee's army
was concentrated near Frederick, behind the Monocacy River, having
begun the crossing of the Potomac on the 4th. There was a singular
dearth of trustworthy information on the subject at our army
headquarters. We moved forward by very short marches of six or eight
miles, feeling our way so cautiously that Lee's reports speak of it
as an unexpectedly slow approach. The Comte de Paris excuses it on
the ground of the disorganized condition of McClellan's army after
the recent battle. It must be remembered, however, that Sumner's
corps and Franklin's had not been at the second Bull Run, and were
veterans of the Potomac Army. The Twelfth Corps had been Banks's,
and it too