ere was in bringing up
supplies when the fighting was over, and of the delays in transporting
wounded. Coming toward the town at this crawling rate, we passed some
fields where the fences were down and the ground slightly tossed up:
'That's where Kilpatrick's Cavalry-men fought the rebels,' some one
said; 'and close by that barn a rebel soldier was found day before
yesterday, sitting dead'--no one to help, poor soul,--'near the whole
city full.' The railroad bridge broken up by the enemy, Government had
not rebuilt as yet, and we stopped two miles from the town, to find
that, as usual, just where the Government had left off the Commission
came in. There stood their temporary lodge and kitchen, and here,
hobbling out of their tents, came the wounded men who had made their
way down from the corps-hospitals, expecting to leave at once in the
return-cars.

"This is the way the thing was managed at first: The surgeons left in
care of the wounded three or four miles out from the town, went up and
down among the men in the morning, and said, 'Any of you boys who can
make your way to the cars can go to Baltimore.' So off start all who
think they feel well enough; anything better than the 'hospitals,' so
called, for the first few days after a battle. Once the men have the
surgeons' permission to go, they are off; and there may be an interval
of a day, or two days, should any of them be too weak to reach the train
in time, during which these poor fellows belong to no one,--the hospital
at one end, the railroad at the other,--with far more than a chance of
falling through between the two. The Sanitary Commission knew this would
be so of necessity, and, coming in, made a connecting link between these
two ends.

"For the first few days the worst cases only came down in ambulances
from the hospitals; hundreds of fellows hobbled along as best they could
in heat and dust, for hours, slowly toiling; and many hired farmers'
wagons, as hard as the farmers' fists themselves, and were jolted down
to the railroad, at three or four dollars the man. Think of the
disappointment of a soldier, sick, body and heart, to find, at the end
of this miserable journey, that his effort to get away, into which he
had put all his remaining stock of strength, was useless; that 'the cars
had gone,' or 'the cars were full;' that while he was coming others had
stepped down before him, and that he must turn all the weary way back
again, or sleep on the road-si