Perhaps there is no more pathetic figure in the annals of the War than Pope. In the West, that fiery furnace where the North's greatest generals were already being molded, he stood out most prominently in the Spring of 1862. At Washington, the administration was cudgeling its brains for means to meet the popular clamor for an aggressive campaign against Lee after the Peninsula fiasco. Pope was sent for and arrived in Washington in June. When the plan to place him at the head of an army whose three corps commanders all outranked him, was proposed, he begged to be sent back West. But he was finally persuaded to undertake a task, the magnitude of which was not yet appreciated at the North. During a month of preparation he was too easily swayed by the advice and influenced by the plans of civilians, and finally issued a flamboyant address to his army ending with the statement, "My headquarters will be in the saddle." When this was shown to Lee, he grimly commented, "Perhaps his headquarters will be where his hindquarters ought to be." There followed the brief campaign, the stunning collision with the solid front of Stonewall Jackson at Cedar Mountain, and the clever strategy that took Pope at a disadvantage on the old battlefield of Bull Run. Thence his army retreated more badly beaten from a military standpoint than the rout which fled the same field a year before. A brief summer had marked the rise and fall of Pope. Two years later Sherman bade good-bye to his friend Grant also summoned from the West. "Remember Pope," was the gist of his warning; "don't stay in Washington; keep in the field." CEDAR MOUNTAIN The Army of Virginia, under Pope, is now to bear the brunt of Lee's assault, while the Army of the Potomac is dismembered and sent back whence it came, to add in driblets to Pope's effective.--_Colonel Theodore A. Dodge, U. S. A., in "A Bird's-Eye View of the Civil War."_ General George B. McClellan, with all his popularity at the beginning, had failed in his Peninsula campaign to fulfil the expectations of the great impatient public of the North. At the same time, while the Army of the Potomac had as yet won no great victories, the men of the West could triumphantly exhibit the trophies won at Donelson, at Pea Ridge, at Shiloh, and at Island No. 10. The North thereupon came to believe that the Western leaders were more able than those of the East. This belief was shared by the President and his Secretary of War and it led to the determination to call on the West for help.