Grant dispatched two divisions of cavalry with orders to tear up the Lynchburg and Danville Railroad. They spread ruin south to the Staunton River, but here W.H.F. Lee, who had followed, attacked them at Blacks and Whites. Retiring they found themselves between two fires. Wade Hampton and Fitzhugh Lee, back from the fight at Trevillian’s Station, fell upon the two divisions at Sapony Church. Infantry of Mahone’s came up also and aided. After a running fight of a day and night, in which the blue lost, in killed and wounded and taken, fifteen hundred men, twelve guns, and a wagon train, they escaped over the Blackwater, burning the bridge between them and the grey, and so returned to Grant at Petersburg.
On the first of July, General Alexander, Longstreet’s Chief of Artillery, wounded and furloughed home, was driven, before quitting the lines, to Violet Bank, where were Lee’s headquarters. About the place were small, much the worse for wear, Confederate tents. The commanding general himself had a room within the house. The wounded officer found him standing, with several of the staff, upon the porch steps. He had his field-glasses open, and he was listening to the report of a scout. When at last the man saluted and fell back, Alexander stated the conviction that was in him. He felt a certainty that the enemy was engaged in driving a mine under the point known as Elliott’s Salient.
“Why do you think so, General?”
“Their sharpshooters keep up a perpetual, converging fire, sir, upon just that hand’s-breadth of our line. On the other hand, they pay so little attention to the works to right and left that the men can show themselves with impunity. They are not clearing the ground for surface approaches—well, then, I think that they are working underground. If you were going from that side to explode a mine and assault immediately afterward, that would be the place you would choose, I think.”
“That is true,” said Lee. “But you would have to make a long tunnel to get under that salient, General.”
“About five hundred feet, sir.”
Mr. Francis Lawley, of the London Times, was of the group upon the steps. “In the siege of Delhi, sir, we drove what was, I believe, considered the longest possible gallery. It was four hundred feet. Beyond that it was found impossible to ventilate.”
“The enemy,” said Alexander, “have a number of Pennsylvania coal-miners, who may be trusted to find some means to ventilate. This war is doing a power of things that were not done at Delhi.”
“I will act on your warning, General,” said Lee.
The next day the grey began to drive two countermines. Later in the month they started two others. Pegram’s battery occupied the threatened salient, with Elliott’s troops in the rifle-pits. The grey miners drove as far and fast as they might, but they tunnelled outward from either flank of the salient, while the Pennsylvania coal-miners, twenty feet underground, dug straight toward the apex. The days passed—many days.