There were some twenty more regiments of infantry on the second day, but fewer cavalry regiments and fewer batteries of artillery.
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.