the Rappahannock to Chantilly might have been traced by the stains of bloody feet along the highways; and if the statement is more graphic than exact, yet it does not fall far short of the truth.  Many a stout soldier, who had hobbled along on his bare feet until Pope was encountered and defeated, found himself utterly incapable of marching into Maryland.  In rear of the army the roads were covered with stragglers.  Squads of infantry, banding together for protection, toiled along painfully by easy stages, unable to keep pace with the colours, but hoping to be up in time for the next fight; and amongst these were not a few officers.  But this was not the worst.  Lax discipline and the absence of soldierly habits asserted themselves with the same pernicious effect as in the Valley.  Not all the stragglers had their faces turned towards the enemy, not all were incapacitated by physical suffering.  Many, without going through the formality of asking leave, were making for their homes, and had no idea that their conduct was in any way peculiar.  They had done their duty in more than one battle, they had been long absent from their farms, their equipment was worn out, the enemy had been driven from Virginia, and they considered that they were fully entitled to some short repose.  And amongst these, whose only fault was an imperfect sense of their military obligations, was the residue of cowards and malingerers shed by every great army engaged in protracted operations.

Lee had been joined by the divisions of D.H.  Hill, McLaws, Walker, and by Hampton’s cavalry, and the strength of his force should have been 65,000 effectives.* (* Calculated on the basis of the Field Returns dated July 20, 1862, with the addition of Jackson’s and Ewell’s divisions, and subtracting the losses (10,000) of the campaign against Pope.) But it was evident that these numbers could not be long maintained.  The men were already accustomed to half-rations of green corn, and they would be no worse off in Maryland and Pennsylvania, untouched as yet by the ravages of war, than in the wasted fields of Virginia.  The most ample commissariat, however, would not compensate for the want of boots and the want of rest, and a campaign of invasion was certain to entail an amount of hard marching to which the strength of the troops was hardly equal.  Not only had the South to provide from her seven millions of white population an army larger than that of Imperial France, but from a nation of agriculturists she had to provide another army of craftsmen and mechanics to enable the soldiers to keep the field.  For guns and gun-carriages, powder and ammunition, clothing and harness, gunboats and torpedoes, locomotives and railway plant, she was now dependent on the hands of her own people and the resources of her own soil; the organisation of those resources, scattered over a vast extent of territory, was not to be accomplished in the course of a few months, nor was the supply of skilled labour sufficient to