The special interest which attached to the review, aside from the inestimable significance of a restored Union, consisted in the fact that the spectators, who were reckoned by tens of thousands, saw before them an actual, living, fighting army. They were not holiday troops with bright uniforms, trained only for display and carrying guns that were never discharged against a foe. They were a great body of veterans who had not slept under a roof for years, who had marched over countries more extended than those traversed by the Legions of Caesar, who had come from a hundred battle-fields on which they had left dead comrades more numerous than the living who now celebrated the final victory of peace. It was the remembrance of this which in all the glad rejoicing over the past and all the bright anticipation of the future lent a tinge of sadness to the splendid and inspiring spectacle of the day. The applause so heartily given for the soldiers who were present could not be unaccompanied by tears for the fate of that vast host which had gone down to death without even the consolation of knowing that they had not died in vain. In the four years of their service the armies of the Union, counting every form of conflict, great and small, had been in twenty-two hundred and sixty-five engagements with the Confederate troops. From the time when active hostilities began until the last gun of the war was fired, a fight of some kind--a raid, a skirmish, or a pitched battle--occurred at some point on our widely extended front nearly eleven times a week upon an average. Counting only those engagements in which the Union loss in killed, wounded, and missing exceeded one hundred, the total number was three hundred and thirty,--averaging one every four and a half days. From the northernmost point of contact to the southernmost, the distance by any practicable line of communications was more than two thousand miles. From East to West the extremes were fifteen hundred miles apart. During the first year of hostilities--one of preparation on both sides --the battles were naturally fewer in number and less decisive in character than afterwards, when discipline had been imparted to the troops by drill, and when the _materiel_ of war had been collected and stored for prolonged campaigns. The engagements of all kinds in 1861 were thirty-five in number, of which the most serious was the Union defeat at Bull Run. In 1862 the war had greatly increased in magnitude and intensity, as is shown by the eighty-four engagements between the armies. The net result of the year's operations was highly favorable to the Rebellion. In 1863 the battles were one hundred and ten in number--among them some of the most significant and important victories for the Union. In 1864 there were seventy-three engagements, and in the winter and early spring of 1865 there were twenty-eight.