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"     The Armies are quiet now. Withdrawing from close contact in almost all theaters, the American and rebel armies in the East, in the Center, and in the West, have more or less pulled in their horns for the winter, leaving screen lines to face each other while the main bodies disengage. This is for the simple fact that although Grant and Lee and the other generals of the armies all often felt they and their men were more than the equals of their opposite numbers, nobody doubted the power of General Winter. Few outside the military have much appreciation for the fact that actually living out of doors during the winter is itself an exercise in survival. And even we in the modern military, with our diesel heating systems adaptable to field conditions and high-tech cold-weather gear have only a passing appreciation for what it would have been like 150 years ago. Wool and leather, while nice, are decidedly less so when they get wet and you only have one set. Rubberized ponchos for rain-gear are decidedly less desirable than our modern Goretex jackets, and shelters made from little more than thick canvas with nothing more substantial than wool blankets inside leave quite a lot of room for improvement. And so improve they did, as best they could, with what they had. In the American armies, this was a significant advantage. Meade, still in command of the Army of the Potomac, had the option to keep his forces mostly concentrated. His lines of supply are secure and he has magnificent logistics support by both rail and wagon-trains. So that is what he does, keeping much of the Army in a very large encampment near Brandy Station, where that first battle of the Gettysburg Campaign took place more than six months ago. Lee, on the other hand, is faced with a more challenging situation. His logistic support is not nearly as good, either in the quantity of what can come through, the quality of what makes it to his men, or the throughput that his own supply lines can deliver. He really does not have much of an option, and so must disperse his forces fairly widely in separate corps, and even division-level encampments so that they can be supplied by a wider area and transportation network. (This is an old practice, and so has sometimes been used to lure an enemy into an ill-advised attack. Indeed, Napoleon himself managed to fool his opponents during the War of the Third Coalition in 1805 by convincing the Russians and Austrians that he had dispersed his forces, as was usual, for the winter. They attacked what they thought was his weakened force and received a rude surprise at the Battle of Austerlitz when Napoleons secretly united force faced them and crushed their combined armies.) And so as the winter closes in the American armies, rich in resources and building strength in men, settle in for a mostly comfortable winter. They have tents that accommodate (usually) six men, though in some units slightly larger ones might have as many as twelve men. In many cases the men have dug down two or three feet below the surface and pitched their tent set down in this opening, a useful trick as the worst thing about a canvas tent is the wind that comes in through every imaginable gap. In many cases they are supplied with enough bricks to build themselves a small fireplace, with a chimney, for heating. Attuned now to what winter is going to be like, field kitchens can be established for communal cooking and drainage is seen as something quite important. Most importantly, if the officers are competent, latrines and sanitary conditions are established and enforced, because it is disease, not shrapnel or the .57 caliber Minie Ball which is the greatest killer in winter. It is a far cry from the largely ad-hoc mud-and-branches huts in which many endured the first winter of the war. The Army now knows what it needs, and had planned ahead, ensuring that General Winter would be, mostly, thwarted when he faced the American Army. In the rebel armies the conditions varied much more than they did for the Americans. Some units, supplied from their home states or even their home towns, had most of what they needed. In the south as well, fighting on what they considered &amp;quot;their&amp;quot; territory, there was also a greater inclination to (mostly voluntarily) house soldiers in civilian structures, be these houses or barns, or even converted sheds, the effect was the same. Soldiers made do with what they had, but they were often much more dispersed and unlikely to be ready as a large-scale unit in any sort of rapid fashion. Exacerbating the differences was the fact that while the rebel cause was still strong enough to keep several armies in the field, those armies were starting to dwindle. Desertion had really started to rear its head as a significant cause for concern in the rebel armies during the harvest season of 1863, and over the winter the number of replacements only barely started to make a dent in bringing their armies back up to strength. At the same time, while the newly introduced conscription laws in the north were not popular, the US government did have some of the kinks worked out by now and so the American armies began to swell with equipped, able-bodied men, and entire new regiments began to arrive at the front. (Training would be conducted with the units themselves in the case of individual replacements, which was not common. But that is a point I will address later.) Though enlistments were due to run out for many units in the Spring, soldiers who volunteered to re-enlist now for &amp;quot;three years or the duration&amp;quot; received 30 days leave, and not a few took the option. Units, from the division up to the Corps level were reorganized and re-balanced, as the ranks grew and grew, and then grew some more. I do not own a television, but I have seen a few seasons of the HBO series Game of Thrones on DVD. One of the lines in that series, a line implying a gathering storm of terrible violence, is the phrase, &amp;quot;Winter is Coming.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s a nice line, but that is fantasy. In this reality of 150 years ago, the worst thing that could be said as the Armies went into their Winter Encampments was this: &amp;quot;Spring is Coming.&amp;quot; And with the spring, the dams will break, because with the spring comes Ulysses S. Grant. The opinions here are not those of the Department of Defense, the Department of the Army, or the Army of Northern Virginia. I can be reached, as always, in the comments or at R_Bateman_LTC@hotmail.com. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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