"Oh, my men! Dis here's gwine ter be er great fight. De greatest fight in all de war. We gwine ter take ole Petersburg dis day. De day er Juberlee is come. Yes, Lawd! An' den we take Richmon', 'stroy Lee's army an' en' dis war. Yas, Lawd, an' 'member dat Gen'l Grant an' Gen'l Burnside, an' Gen'l Meade's is all right here a-watch-in' ye! An' member dat I'se er watchin' ye. I'se er sargint in dis here comp'ny. Any you tries ter be a skulker, you'se gwine ter git a beyonet run clean froo ye—yas, Lawd! You hear me!"
He had scarcely finished his harangue when a smothering peal of thunder shook the world. The ground rocked beneath the feet of the men. Some were thrown backwards. Some staggered and caught a comrade's shoulder. A pillar of blinding flame shot to the stars. A cloud of smoke rolled upward and spread its pall over the trembling earth. A shower of human flesh and bones spattered the smoking ground.
The men in front shivered as they brushed the pieces of red meat from their hands and clothes.
The artillery opened. Hundreds of guns were pouring shells from their flaming mouths. The people of Petersburg leaped from their beds and pressed into the streets stunned by the appalling shock and the storm of artillery which followed.
The ground in front of the tunnel had been cleared of the abatis. Burnside's New England veterans rushed the crater. A huge hole had been torn in Lee's fortifications one hundred yards long and sixty feet wide and twenty-five feet in depth.
The hole proved a grave. The charging troops floundered in its spongy, blood-soaked sides. They stumbled and fell into its pit. The regiments in the rear, rushing through the smoke and stumbling over the mangled pieces of flesh of Elliott's three hundred men who had been torn to pieces, were on top of the line in front before they could clear the crumbling walls.
When the charging hosts at last reached the firm ground inside the Confederate lines, the men in gray were rallying. Their guns had been trained on the yawning chasm now a struggling, squirming, cursing mass of blue. Slowly order came out of chaos and Burnside's men swung to the right and to the left and swept Lee's trenches for three hundred yards in each direction. The charging regiments poured into them and found the second Confederate line. Elliott's men who yet lived, driven from their outer line by the resistless rush of the attack, retreated to a deep ravine, rallied and held this third line.
Lee reached the field and took command. Mahone's men came to the rescue marching with swift, steady tread. They took their position on the crest which commanded the open space toward the captured trenches.
As Wright's brigade moved into position, the Black Battalions were ordered to charge. They had been hurried through the crater and into the trenches on the right and left. At the signal they swarmed over the works, with a voodoo yell, and in serried black waves, charged the men in gray. In broad daylight the Southerners saw for the first time the plan of the dramatic attack.
The white men of the South shrieked an answer and gripped their muskets. The cry they gave came down the centuries from three thousand years of history. It came from the hearts of a conquering race of men. They had heard the Call of the Blood of the Race that rules the world.