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prediction of Southern victory. “Though a line of earthworks hurriedly thrown up in a few hours at Petersburg was nearly all that kept Grant’s well-organized army from entering the capital; though the necessaries of war, and even of life, were growing alarmingly short,” he wrote after the war, “still everyone seemed satisfied that the South would somehow or other gain the day.” Lawley he could excuse, since the journalist was “so carried away by his admiration of the wonderful pluck shown by the Southerners … whereas all of us … should have seen the end coming months before we were obliged to open our eyes to the fact it was come.”18

The Welsh army veterinarian Griffith Evans had obtained an observer’s pass from the Medical Department and was visiting the Federal lines at the same time that Hobart-Hampden was with the Confederates. He, too, had little sense that the South was struggling when he arrived at Petersburg. His first visit was to General Butler’s camp on July 3, where the flies were already a pestilence. (They were the biting kind and “are very troublesome indeed,” James Horrocks complained to his brother.)19 All day long, wrote Evans, the men sat in their fetid dugouts, sweltering in the heat, until the night shift relieved them. It was a dreadful existence, and he pitied them. Soldiers talked to him about the “fearful slaughtering” they had witnessed in vague tones, “as if they wished to forget it.”

Driving around the countryside, Evans thought he had never beheld anything so hideous, so redolent of biblical destruction: “Fences pulled down for fuel, the crops in the fields trodden down, houses deserted or occupied by troops, or burnt down, thousands of recent graves of men killed or died lately, and those so shallow that the stench from them was in places intolerable. Dead cattle and horses, men’s accoutrements, etc., strewn about, etc. etc. It was indescribable and the effect was sad and sickening.”20 He could not imagine how the soldiers would tolerate their conditions for much longer.

A rumor was spreading through the camps during Evans’s visit. The army discouraged discussion of it, but the news eventually leaked out. Sir Percy Wyndham had ridden into the camp of the 1st New Jersey Cavaliers insisting that he was once more their colonel. Although the men knew that the New Jersey state legislature had petitioned Washington for Wyndham’s reinstatement for the second time on June 4, there had been no indication that Stanton had changed his mind. After a tense standoff, the lieutenant colonel of the regiment ordered the arrest of Wyndham, who refused to leave quietly. Wyndham created such an uproar that General Meade had him escorted to Washington under guard on July 1. His discharge papers were waiting for him when he arrived. On July 5, 1864, Sir Percy Wyndham was officially mustered out of the army, and strongly encouraged to leave town.30.1

Griffith Evans’s own return to Washington was impeded by a Confederate raid on the perimeter. The audacious attack led by Jubal Early was an attempt by Lee to force Grant into detaching part of his army to defend Washington. “There is a large Confederate force within three or four miles of Washington, and some perhaps think they will make an attempt to take the town today,” Lord Lyons informed his sister on July 13. But though there was panic in the city, the legation was not even bothering to pack up the archives. “Even if the town was taken my physical comfort would not be likely to be disturbed,” Lyons decided. “I don’t really expect to have to move, and I daresay you will hear next week that things have lapsed into their odious condition.”

Lyons was far more worried about the state of his staff. He repeatedly told the Foreign Office that it could no longer assign the same number of attachés to Washington as it did to Ulan Bator. The secretary, William Stuart, and one of the junior staff had left before the arrival of their replacements. “The heat is overpowering,” Lyons wrote to Lord Russell. “I am anxiously looking out for [their] arrival … and I hope they will