It was midnight when the battery to which Baillie was attached reached Manassas Junction. The men were weary and half-starved after three days of fighting and marching, and the horses, worn out with dragging the guns and caissons over well-nigh impassable roads, were famishing for water. But an effort to secure water and forage for them failed, and so did an effort to secure water and rations for the men. For on the eve of the first great battle of the war the Southern army was in a state of semi-starvation which grew worse with every hour that brought fresh relays of troops but no new supplies of food. Already had begun that course of extraordinary mismanagement in the supply departments at Richmond which throughout the war kept the Army of Northern Virginia constantly half-starving or wholly starving, even when, as at Manassas, it lay in the midst of a land of abounding plenty. All the efforts of the generals commanding in the field to remedy this state of things by drawing upon the granaries and smoke-houses round about them for supplies that were in danger of presently falling into the enemy's hands, were thwarted by the stupid obstinacy of a crack-brained commissary-general. It was his inexplicable policy, while the army lay at Manassas with an unused railroad reaching into the rich fields to the west, to forbid the purchase of food and forage there except by his own direct agents, who were required to send it all to Richmond, whence it was transported back again, in such meagre quantities as an already overtaxed single track railroad could manage to carry. Red-tape was choking the army to death from the very beginning, and it continued to do so to the end, in spite of all remonstrances. Even in the matter of water the men at Manassas were restricted to a few pints a day to each man for all uses, simply because the commanding general was not allowed the simple means of procuring a more adequate supply. This, however, is not the place in which to set forth in detail those facts of perverse stupidity which have been fully stated in official reports, in General Beauregard's memoirs, and in other authoritative works. Such matters are mentioned herein only so far as they affected the events that go to make up the present story.