The other excuse made by General Hunter that his army was out of ammunition, is equally untenable. It cannot be believed that a corps was short of ammunition which had been organized but a few weeks, a part only of which had been engaged at Piedmont, and which had fought no serious pitched battle, and the sheep, chickens, hogs and cattle they wantonly shot on their march could not have exhausted their supply. The corps would not have started had the ammunition been so scarce. It would have been against all precedent, and any thinking man must know that the Ordnance Department of the United States army, always full-handed, had well supplied ammunition to an army about to start on so important an undertaking. No brigade or division commander in his correspondence or in his report made any such complaint. It would have given them pleasure to have had some excuse for retreating. They undertook to give no excuse, and their silence is so logical that it points out with great effect the fact that they had no belief in Hunter's excuses, and laid the real blame of the ignominious failure upon the incompetence of Hunter himself. The obvious cause of Hunter's failure was that he did not reach Lynchburg on the 16th, the day upon which, according to Averell's plan, he was due. Had he reached his destination on the 16th he could have occupied the town without opposition. General Breckinridge was there, an invalid, and his troops were there in small numbers, much wearied, and they, with a few Silver Gray home guards, and the boys from the Institute, constituted the sole garrison opposing his army of twenty-five thousand men. Why he did not come up is accounted for upon two grounds. The first of which was the unnecessary delay at Lexington.