Again Grant sought to flank his wily foe. This time he beat Lee to the spot. The two armies rushed for Cold Harbor in parallel columns flashing at each other deadly volleys as they marched. Lee took second choice of ground and entrenched on a gently sloping line of hills. They swung in crescent as at Fredericksburg.
With consummate skill he placed his guns and infantry to catch both flanks and front of the coming foe. And then he waited for Grant to charge. Thousands of men in the blue ranks were busy now sewing their names in their underclothing.
With the first streak of dawn, at 4:30, they charged. They walked into the mouth of a volcano flaming tons of steel and lead in their faces. The scene was sickening. Nothing like it had, to this time, happened in the history of man.
Ten thousand men in blue fell in twenty minutes.
Meade ordered Smith to renew the assault. Daring a court martial, Smith flatly refused.
The story of the next seventy-two hours our historians have refused to record. Through the smothering heat of summer for three days and nights the shrieks and groans of the wounded rose in endless waves of horror. No hand could be lifted to save. With their last breath they begged, wept, cried, prayed for water. No man dared move in the storm-swept space. Here and there a heroic boy in blue caught the cry of a wounded comrade and crawled on his belly to try a rescue only to die in the embrace of his friend.
When the truce was called to clear the shambles every man of the ten thousand who had fallen was dead—save two. The salvage corps walked in a muck of blood. They slipped and stumbled and fell in its festering pools. The flies and vultures were busy. Dead horses, dead men, smashed guns, legs, arms, mangled bodies disemboweled, the earth torn into an ashen crater.
In the thirty days since Grant had met Lee in the wilderness, the
Northern army had lost sixty thousand men, the bravest of our race.
Lee's losses were not so great but they were tragic. They were as great in proportion to the number he commanded.
Grant paused to change his plan of campaign. The procession of ambulances into Washington had stunned the Nation. Every city, town, village, hamlet and country home was in mourning. A stream of protest against the new Commander swept the North. Lincoln refused to remove him. And on his head was heaped the blame for all the anguish of the bitter years of failure.