While the great army lay waiting and expectant at Brandy Station, it was significant to Carleton when the swift-riding orderlies suddenly left headquarters carrying sealed packages to the corps commanders. First began the tramping of the cavalry. Next followed the movement of two divisions of the Fifth Corps. All night long was heard the rumble of artillery. Carleton wrote: "Peering from my window upon the shadowy landscape at midnight, I saw the glimmering of thousands of camp-fires, over all the plain. Hillside, valley, nook, and dell, threw up its flickering light. Long trains of white canvas wagons disappeared in the distant gloom. "At three A. M., the reveille, the roll of innumerable drums, and the blow of bugles sounded, and as morning brightened, dark masses of armed men stood in long line. With the first beams of the sun peering over the landscape, they moved from the hills. Disjointed parts were welded together, regiments became brigades, brigades grew into divisions, and divisions became corps. The sunlight flashed from a hundred thousand bayonets and sabres." Thus in a few hours a great city of male inhabitants, numbering over the tenth of a million, disappeared. By night-time, in a rapid march, Grant was in headquarters in a deserted house near the Germania Ford. There Carleton noticed the general's simple style of living. Unostentatious in all his habits, he smoked constantly, often whittling a stick while thinking, and wasting no words. Grant had stolen a march upon Lee, and was as near Richmond as were the Confederates, who must attack him in flank and retard him if possible. Knowing every road and bridle-path in the Wilderness, Lee, having drawn all the resources of the Confederacy east of Georgia into his lines, had gathered an army the largest and the most complete he had yet commanded. He must now cut up Grant's host; or, if unable to do so, even without defeat, must begin a march which meant some American Saint Helena as its end.