The Second Corps did not try. No more did the First nor the Third. The Army of Northern Virginia _was_ in good spirits. Behind it lay some weeks of rest and recuperation; behind that the victory of the Wilderness. Worn and inadequate enough as it was, yet this army’s equipment was better to-day than it had been. It had the spoils of great battle-fields. Artillery was notably bettered; cavalry was fit and fine; infantry a seasoned veteran who thought of a time without war as of some remote golden age. The Army of Northern Virginia was now organized as it had not been organized before for efficiency. It numbered between sixty and seventy thousand men. It had able major- and lieutenant-generals and a very great commanding general. It was veteran, eager for action, confident, with victories behind it. There was something lifted in the spirit of the men. Behind them, across the Potomac, lay a devastated land,—their land, their home, their mother country! Before them lay a battle, a great battle, the greatest battle yet, perhaps! Win it—win it! and see a great rainbow of promise, glorious and bright, arch itself over the land beyond the river, the land darkened, devastated, and beloved!... Before them, as they marched, marched a vision of dead leaders: Shiloh and Albert Sidney Johnston—Port Republic and Ashby—Chancellorsville and Stonewall Jackson—of many dead leaders, and of a many and a many dead comrades. The vision did not hurt; it helped. It did not weaken their hearts; it strengthened them. The Stonewall Brigade found itself in good heart and upon the road to Greencastle. It was a sunny June day and a sunny June road with oxheart cherry trees at intervals. Corps, divisions, brigades, regiments, companies—one and all had orders, calm and complete, not to plunder. “_The Commanding General_,” ran Lee’s general order, “_earnestly exhorts the troops to abstain with most scrupulous care from unnecessary or wanton injury to private property, and he enjoins upon all officers to arrest and bring to summary punishment all who shall in any way offend against the orders on this subject._” To the credit of a poorly clad army, out of a land famished and fordone, be it said that the orders were obeyed. The army was in an enemy’s land, a land of plenty, but the noncombatant farming-people of that land suffered but little in purse or property and not at all in person. “I was told,” writes a good grey artilleryman, “by the inhabitants that they suffered less from our troops than from their own, and that if compelled to have either they preferred having the ‘rebels’ camped upon their land. I saw no plundering whatever, except that once or twice I did see branches laden with fruit broken from cherry trees. Of course it goes without saying that the quartermasters, especially of artillery battalions, were confessedly, and of malice aforethought, horse-thieves!”