With a careful system of railway work went also thorough study of the wagon trains necessary in the field to carry the baggage of the army, its ammunition, and a few days' rations, its hospital supplies, and the records and papers of all the business departments. Besides the supplies for men, the food for the teams, for the cavalry horses, and for the horses of mounted officers makes in the aggregate a bulk and weight astonishing to those who for the first time undertake the calculation. Great droves of beef cattle accompanied the march, and were coming forward on all the roads from the country in the rear where they could be bought and collected. The purchase, driving, coralling, feeding, and distributing of these made, of itself, a great business for the commissaries of subsistence. The introduction of the shelter tent of two india-rubber blankets got us rid of the regimental trains, which at the beginning of the war had been the most unwieldy of all our _impedimenta_. The two soldiers who were thus partners in the little house they carried on their backs, clubbed all their arrangements for comfort, and by working together greatly reduced the hardships of campaigning. Sherman applied the full force of his mind and the strong impulse of his personal example to discarding everything not essential to the army work, and to securing the utmost mobility in his columns. Throughout the campaign his own headquarters looked small and bare compared with those of many of his subordinates. Some writers have ridiculed this, as if it were a mere "fad" of the general; but it was both wise and shrewd to keep before the army the constant lesson that privation was necessary, and that the orders on the subject must be obeyed, since the commander set the example of obedience. It was akin to Bonaparte's marching on foot through the burning sands of Syria after his repulse from St. Jean d'Acre. It was speaking to the soldiers in the ranks a language which they understood, and which helped them in their arduous work more than proclamations.