great post of responsibility. He
has to see that all the supplies are obtained and forwarded to the right
place. He commands all these countless wagons with their teamsters. It
is also his duty, when on the march, to pick out the camp, unless the
general may take it from out of his hands. The army, as a general thing,
will not fight well unless it is well fed and well cared for. To assist
him, the quartermaster has his necessary clerks, for he carries on a
large business, with Uncle Sam as his principal, and he must account to
him for every pound of coffee, bacon, flour, and hay, barrel of vinegar,
keg of nails, tent or tent pin that he receives, and finally return
them, or tell him satisfactorily where they have gone, and produce his
vouchers; or he and his bondsmen must pay their value. All this is done
by system and rule: there are mounted wagonmasters to look out for every
small string of wagons, and some sort of discipline prevails among these
non-enlisted men. A great army must be a moving city, capable of
subsisting itself in the uncultivated and desert regions through which
it often passes. Every cavalry soldier carries his spare horseshoes and
nails; and every cavalry regiment and every battery of artillery has its
own forge, tools, and materials for shoeing its horses and making
repairs: even the quartermaster's train must have its blacksmiths and
their supplies.

In travelling down the Rhone during the Crimean war, I was vainly trying
to make out the meaning of the letters on the military button of an
officer sitting before me; when one of his companions, who happened to
be at my side, a well-educated, intelligent man, good-naturedly informed
me that they indicated that the wearer belonged to the bureau of the
post. He and several others on the boat had been educated for this
branch of the service at a military school in Paris, and were en route
for the sole purpose of taking charge of this department. We have not
arrived at this perfection; for ours, after all, in many respects, is an
army of volunteers; but still a messenger had to go every day to
Washington for the letters of the army corps, and the telegraph and its
wires travel with the camp. The officers' servants alone, in an army of
a hundred and fifty thousand men, number more than the thirty-nine
hundred soldiers the city of Boston has to raise for her proportion of
the levy of nine-months men. The number of servants and horses of an
officer depend