Life had taken on for Steve an aspect of ’62 in the Valley—only worse. In a dreadful dream he seemed to be recovering old tints, repeating old experiences from Front Royal to Winchester—but all darkened and hardened. In ’62 the country was still rich, and you could forage, but now there was no foraging. There was nothing to forage for. Then the old Army of the Valley had been ill-clad and curiously confident and cheerful, with Mr. Commissary Banks double-quicking down the pike, before Old Jack! Now the Second Corps was worse-clad, and far, far from the ancient careless cheer. It still laughed and joked and sang, but less often, and always, when it did laugh, it was with a certain grimness as of Despair not far off. On night and day marches, you heard song and jest, indeed, but you heard heavy sighs as well—a heavy sighing in the night-time or the daytime, as the army moved on the Valley Pike. Now confident good cheer in others was extraordinarily necessary to Steve. When it flagged, it was as though a raft had sunk from beneath him. Yes, it was ’62 over again, but a homesick, strange, far worse ’62! Daily life grew to be for him a series of shocks, more or less violent, but all violent. Life went in magic-lantern slides—alternate blackness and frightful, vivid pictures in which blood red predominated. Steve developed a morbid horror of blood. August came. At Moorefield occurred a cavalry fight, Averell against McCausland and Bradley Johnson, the grey suffering defeat. On the seventh came Sheridan with the Sixth and the Nineteenth Army Corps and Torbert’s great force of cavalry. The blue forces in the Valley now numbered perhaps forty-five thousand, with some thousands more in garrison at Martinsburg and Harper’s Ferry. Lee sent in this month Kershaw’s division and Fitzhugh Lee’s cavalry, but in a few weeks, indeed, Kershaw must be recalled to Petersburg, where they needed every man—every man and more! In the Valley August and the first third of September went by in marchings and counter-marchings, infantry skirmishing and cavalry raids. The third week of the latter month found the grey gathered behind the Opequon. Mid-September and the woods by the Opequon turning red and gold. “Ah,” said the Sixty-fifth, “we camped here after Sharpsburg, before we went over the mountains and fought at Fredericksburg! But it isn’t as it was—it isn’t as it was—”