He signalled Burnside for reinforcements.
General Sumner's division on the Union right had charged into the deadliest trap of all.
Down the road toward the foot of Marye's Heights his magnificent army swept at double quick. The Confederate batteries had been specially trained to rake this road from three directions, right, and left flank and centre.
Steadily, stoically the men in blue pressed into this narrow way in silence and met the flaming torrent from three directions. Rushing on over the bodies of their fallen comrades the thinning ranks reached the old stone wall at the foot of the hill. General Cobb lay concealed behind it with three thousand infantry. The low quick order ran along his line:
"Fire!"
Straight into the faces of the heroic Union soldiers flashed a level blinding flame from three thousand muskets, slaying, crushing, tearing to pieces the proud army of an hour ago. A thousand men in blue fell in five minutes. The ground was piled with their bodies until it was impossible to charge over them effectively.
For a moment a cloud of smoke pitifully drew a soft grey veil over the awful scene while the men who were left fell back in straggling broken groups.
Five times the Union hosts had charged those terrible brown hills and five times they had been rolled back in red waves of blood.
Late in the day a fierce bitter wind was blowing from the north. There was yet time to turn defeat into victory. The desperate Union Commander ordered the sixth charge.
The men in blue pulled their hats down low as if to shut out the pelting hail of lead and iron and without a murmur charged once more into the mouth of hell. The winds had frozen stiff the bodies of their dead. The advancing blue lines snatched these dead men from the ground, carried them in front, stacked them in long piles for bulwarks, and fought behind them with the desperation of madmen. There was no escape. The keen eyes of the Confederate Commanders had planted their right and left flanking lines to pour death into these ranks no matter how high their corpses were piled. The crescent hill blazed and roared with unceasing fury. Only the darkness was kind at last.