General Lee retired before him with a heavy heart and a deep melancholy, which, in spite of his great control over himself, was visible in his countenance.  The infantry-fighting of the campaign had begun, and ended in disaster for him.  In the thirty days he had lost at least two thousand men, and was back again in his old camps, having achieved absolutely nothing.

V.

THE ADVANCE TO MINE RUN.

November of the bloody year 1863 had come; and it seemed not unreasonable to anticipate that a twelvemonth, marked by such incessant fighting at Chancellorsville, Fredericksburg, Salem Church, Winchester, Gettysburg, Front Royal, Bristoe, and along the Rappahannock, would now terminate in peace, permitting the combatants on both sides, worn out by their arduous work, to go into winter-quarters, and recuperate their energies for the operations of the ensuing spring.

But General Meade had otherwise determined.  He had resolved to try a last advance, in spite of the inclement weather; and Lee’s anticipations of a season of rest and refreshment for his troops, undisturbed by hostile demonstrations on the part of the enemy, were destined speedily to be disappointed.  The Southern army had gone regularly into winter-quarters, south of the Rapidan, and the men were felicitating themselves upon the prospect of an uninterrupted season of leisure and enjoyment in their rude cabins, built in sheltered nooks, or under their breadths of canvas raised upon logs, and fitted with rough but comfortable chimneys, built of notched pine-saplings, when suddenly intelligence was brought by scouts that the Federal army was in motion.  The fact reversed all their hopes of rest, and song, and laughter, by the good log-fires.  The musket was taken from its place on the rude walls, the cartridge-box assumed, and the army was once more ready for battle—­as gay, hopeful, and resolved, as in the first days of spring.

General Meade had, indeed, resolved that the year should not end without another blow at his adversary, and the brief campaign, known as the “Advance to Mine Run,” followed.  It was the least favorable of all seasons for active operations; but the Federal commander is vindicated from the charge of bad soldiership by two circumstances which very properly had great weight with him.  The first was, the extreme impatience of the Northern authorities and people at the small results of the bloody fighting of the year.  Gettysburg had seemed to them a complete defeat of Lee, since he had retreated thereafter without loss of time to Virginia; and yet three months afterward the defeated commander had advanced upon and forced back his victorious adversary.  That such should be the result of the year’s campaigning seemed absurd to the North.  A clamorous appeal was made to the authorities to order another advance; and this general sentiment is said to have been shared by General Meade, who had declared himself bitterly