Years after the battle, ex-President Hayes referred to some statements
in Sheridan's _Memoirs_ thus:

"In speaking of that fight he says that, passing up the pike,
sometimes on one side, and sometimes on the other, coming to Cedar
Creek, he struck the First Division of Getty, of the Sixth Corps;
that he passed along that division a short distance, when there
arose out of a hollow before him a line consisting entirely of
officers of Crook's Army of West Virginia and of color-bearers.
The army had been stampeded in the morning, but these people were
not panic-stricken. They saluted him, but there was nothing now
between the enemy and him and the fugitives but this division of
Getty's. Said he: 'These officers seemed to rise right up from
the ground.' This was twenty-four years afterward, but he recollects
it perfectly well except names. Among them, however, he recollects
seeing one, Colonel R. B. Hayes, since President of the United
States, and drops the story there, leaving the impression that
there were no men there--no privates, no army--simply some color-
bearers and some officers.

"The fact is that in the hollow, just in the rear, was a line of
men, a thousand or twelve hundred, probably, and they had thrown
up a little barricade and were lying close behind it. He came up
and saw these officers and did not see the men, or seems not to
have seen them; but I had no idea at the time that he did not see
the private soldiers in that line. He now tells that singular
story of a line of officers, a line of color-bearers, and no force.
The fact is that first came Getty's division, and then mine, and
then came General Keifer's division, all lying down behind that
barricade, but in good condition, except that there had been some
losses in the morning. General Keifer was next to me, and then
came the rest of the Sixth Corps, and farther down I have no doubt
the Nineteenth Corps was in line. We had then been, I suppose, an
hour or an hour and a half in that position."(16)

Passing from disputed, though important, points relating to the
battle, all agree that when Sheridan reached his army a battle had
been fought and lost to all appearance, and that the Union Army
had been forced to retire to a new position. It should also be
regarded beyond controversy that the Sixth Corps had been united
before his arrival, that broken troops of other commands were being
formed on the Sixth, and that the enemy also had been for