Immediately following them, purposely to bring out the strong contrast, was a brigade of old veterans, just as they came from their long campaign in the South. They were some of the men who had marched with Sherman to the sea--the men who had picked up the ducks and the cornmeal by the wayside. They were soiled and ragged. One man had one leg of his trousers patched out by strange cloth; another had no coat; another had a teakettle swung on his gun over his shoulder; another had part of a ham on his bayonet. So they represented the march through Georgia. They rolled along with an easy, swinging gait, chatting, laughing, occasionally imitating some animal, giving a bark, or a howl, or a screech, yet every man a soldier and keeping step to the music and in line. As these men with their tattered uniforms and torn and stained flags went by, the Baron sprang up, and with tears rolling down his cheeks, threw his arms around Bishop Ames and cried: "Mein Gott! Pishop, these men could _whip the devil_!" General Sherman himself was never enthusiastic over the song that has immortalized his famous march. I have been unable to find in his _Memoirs_ a single reference to it; but he quotes there in full a fine song by Adjutant S. H. M. Byers which he evidently would have been very glad to have had replace the simpler lines of Mr. Work. But Work had the key to the people's heart, and his song will live as long as the American flag. Mr. Byers' song, however, is a splendid piece of work and well worth repeating here. General Sherman says that on the afternoon of February 17, 1865, on overhauling his pockets, according to custom, to read more carefully the various notes and memoranda received during the day, he found a paper which had been given him by a Union prisoner who had escaped from Columbia. "It proved," writes the General, "to be the song of _Sherman's March to the Sea_, which had been composed by Adjutant S. H. M. Byers, of the Fifth Iowa Infantry, when a prisoner in the asylum at Columbia, which had been beautifully written off by a fellow-prisoner, and handed to me in person. This appeared to me so good that I at once sent for Byers, attached him to my staff, provided him with horse and equipment, and took him as far as Fayetteville, North Carolina, whence he was sent to Washington as bearer of despatches." The writing of this song was a good thing for Byers, as it secured him the lifelong friendship of General Sherman, and through his kindly support he was afterward made consul at Zurich, Switzerland. Adjutant Byers said that there was among the prisoners at Columbia an excellent glee club who used to sing it well, with an audience, often, of rebel ladies. It is truly a fine poem:--