John D. Billings, Hardtack and Coffee: The Unwritten Story of Army Life

[254] but such a case would be a deviation, and not the regular plan. So, too, a division might have an extra brigade. For example, a brigade might be detached from one part of the service and sent to join an army in another part. Such a brigade would not be allowed to remain independent in that case, but would be at once assigned to some division, usually a division whose brigades were small in numbers.

I have said that McClellan made up his brigades of four regiments. I think the usual number of regiments for a brigade is three. That gives a system of threes throughout. But in this matter also, after the first organization, the plan was modified. As a brigade became depleted by sickness, capture, and the bullet, new regiments were added, until, as the work of addition and depletion went on, I have known a brigade to have within it the skeletons of ten regiments, and even then its strength not half that of the original body. My camp was located at one time near a regiment which had only thirty-eight men present for duty.

There were twenty-five army corps in the service, at different times, exclusive of cavalry, engineer, and signal corps, and Hancock's veteran corps. The same causes which operated to reduce brigades and divisions naturally decimated corps, so that some of them were consolidated; as, for example, the First and Third Corps were merged in the Second, Fifth, and Sixth, in the spring of 1864. At about the same time the Eleventh and Twelfth were united to form the Twentieth. But enough of corps for the present. What I have stated will make more intelligible what I shall say about

Corps badges.

What are corps badges? The answer to this question is somewhat lengthy, but I think it will be considered interesting. The idea of corps badges undoubtedly had its origin with General Philip Kearny, but just how or exactly when