The affair was nothing. Unfortunately, however, it had enabled the Federal spy to elude us.
Swartz had disappeared like a bird of the night; and all pursuit of him in such a wilderness was impossible.
An hour afterward, I had rejoined Stuart.
XXX. — GRANT STRIKES HIS FIRST BLOW.
Such were the singular scenes which I witnessed, amid the shadows of the Spottsylvania Wilderness, in the first days of May, 1864.
The narrative has brought the reader now to an hour past midnight on the third of May.
An hour before—that is to say, at midnight precisely—the Federal forces began to move: at six in the morning, they had massed on the north bank of the Rapidan; and as the sun rose above the Wilderness, the blue columns began to cross the river.
General Grant, at the head of his army of 140,000 men, had set forth on his great advance toward Richmond—that advance so often tried, so often defeated, but which now seemed, from the very nature of things, to be destined to succeed.