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sheepfold had been raided, when General Hancock wanted to search the camp of the 5th for traces of stolen sheep, Cross stalled him off until his men were able t o plant the bloody pelts in the adjacent camp of the 7th New York. That evening Cross enjoyed roast mutton with the rest of the regiment 2
    A Pennsylvania recruit in General Andrew Humphreys's division recalled that as many as two hundred men from one regiment in his division were arrested on the march with stolen goods in their possession. Yet they were not punished, aside from being confined overnight, and the stolen property was not confiscated. This soldier wrote that the men were convinced that "it was their bounden duty to forage upon all inhabitants of the enemy's country." 3
    Other explanation there was none. And yet this was a curious business. These outbreaks were not coming from rookies or from third-rate troops. There were no better regiments in the army than the 6th Wisconsin and the 5th New Hampshire, and there were no better colonels than theirs. Humphreys's division, commanded by one of the best men in the army, belonged to the V Corps, where regular-army discipline prevailed. If these men were suddenly getting the notion that it was right to spoil the Egyptians, the army was changing and the change deserved study.
    But the high command had more pressing things to think about.
    The high command just then was Major General Ambrose E. Burn-side, to whom the administration seemed to have given the Army of the Potomac in a mood of sheer desperation. In some ways Burnside was about as incompetent a general as Abraham Lincoln ever commissioned, and he comes down in history looking stiff and stuffy with frock coat and incredible whiskers, a man who moved from disaster to disaster with an uncomprehending and wholly unimaginative dignity. Yet there must once have been a warm, rather lively human being somewhere back of the major general's trappings. Burnside was gay and frisky as a West Point cadet, and when he was commissioned a second lieutenant in 1847 and was sent off to Mexico he gambled away his passage money on an Ohio River steamer and had to borrow from a Louisville merchant in order to make the trip. Later, in Mexico City, he played cards so enthusiastically and unskillfully that his pay was in hock for six months in advance, and he would have had to resign in disgrace if a senior officer had not loaned him enough to pay up. He fought Apaches in New Mexico after the war, acquiring a wound and some modest distinction. Transferred east, he wooed a Kentucky belle and took her to the altar, only to be flabbergasted when she returned a firm "No!" to the officiating minister's climactic question. (The same girl later became engaged to an Ohio lawyer, who apparently had heard about Burnside's experience. When the wedding date arrived this man displayed to her a revolver and a marriage license, telling her that it had to be one or the other and she could take her pick. This time she went through with the ceremony.) 4
    In 1852 Burnside invented a breech-loading rifle, resigned from the army to build a factory and manufacture it, and went broke when he lost a War Department contract which had seemed to be certain. George B. McClellan, then vice-president of the Illinois Central Railroad, bailed him out by giving him a job in the railroad's land office, and when the outbreak of the war called him back into military service Burnside had become treasurer of the road.
    It must be admitted that the tradition of failure thus seems to have been fairly well established before he ever became a general; yet it also seems that the man who put that record together was at least not a stodgy person. Something essential in his make-up must have got bleached out in the long years since he got into the history books. He was never anything resembling a great general, yet he apparently was an interesting sort of human being.
    The soldiers themselves, in this fall of 1862, were