While Sheridan rode against Richmond, Lee and Grant were struggling in a pool of red at the "Bloody Angle" of Spottsylvania. The musketry fire against the trees came in a low undertone, like the rattle of a hail storm on the roofs of houses.
A company of blue soldiers were cut off by a wave of charging gray. The men were trying to surrender. Their officers drew their revolvers and ordered them to break through. A sullen private shouted:
"Shoot your officers!"
Every commander dropped in his tracks. And the men were marched to the rear. Hour after hour the flames of hell swirled in endless waves about this angle of the Southern trenches. Line after line of blue broke against it and eddied down its sides in slimy pools.
Color bearers waved their flags in each other's faces, clinched and fought, hand to hand, like devils. Two soldiers on top of the trench, their ammunition spent, choked each other to death and rolled down the embankment among the mangled bodies that filled the ditch.
In this mass of struggling maniacs men were fighting with guns, swords, handspikes, clubbed muskets, stones and fists. Night brought no pause to save the wounded or bury the dead.
For five days Grant circled his blue hosts in a whirlpool of death trying in vain to break Lee's trenches. He gave it up. The stolid, silent man of iron nerves watched the stream of wagons bearing the wounded, groaning and shrieking, from the field. Lee's forces had been handled with such skill the impact of numbers had made but little impression.
Thirty thousand dead and mangled lay on the field.
The stark fighter of the West was facing a new problem. The devotion of Lee's men was a mania. He was unconquerable in a square hand-to-hand fight in the woods.
A truce to bury the dead followed. They found them piled six layers deep in the trenches, blue and gray locked in the last embrace. Black wings were flapping over them unafraid of the living. Their red beaks were tearing at eyes and lips, while deep below yet groaned and moved the wounded.