General Foster returned on the 19th, and on my reporting to him I found at once the benefit of General Burnside's representations in regard to me. Colonel Strong was also well aware of my earnest wish for field service, and the friendship which had grown up on the road, no doubt, made him an influential advocate with his chief. The general received me very kindly, and said that his action had been based on the supposition that I would prefer duty in Kentucky during the winter rather than make the rough journey over the mountains at that season. On my assuring him that my coming without waiting to communicate with him was because of my earnest request to the War Department for service in the field, he was evidently pleased and immediately revoked the orders already made, and assigned me to the Twenty-third Corps, to command it as the senior general officer present. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxi. pt. iii, p. 457.] I had been eight days on the road from Lexington, and the rest of the party who remained with the wagons were a day longer in reaching Knoxville. It had given me a vivid appreciation of the impossibility of supplying an army in East Tennessee by wagon trains over the mountains. The roads by Cumberland Gap or by Emory Gap were less precipitous, but they were more muddy. The forage was exhausted along all the routes, and till grass should grow large trains of supplies were not to be thought of. The effort to force trains through in the autumn had been most destructive to the teams. Noticing how the way was lined by the carcasses of dead horses and mules, we kept an accurate count one day of the number of these. In the twenty miles of that day's journey we counted a hundred and fifty dead draught animals. The movement of wagon-trains had, of course, been suspended when Longstreet advanced upon Knoxville, and bad weather had hardly begun then. Beef cattle could be driven in herds, but the country was so stripped of forage that the danger of starvation by the way made this mode of supply nearly as hopeless as the other.