Part 87 (1/2)

While Sheridan rode against Richmond, Lee and Grant were struggling in a pool of red at the ”b.l.o.o.d.y 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 h.e.l.l 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 ma.s.s 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.

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 flas.h.i.+ng 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 a.s.sault. 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 s.p.a.ce. 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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.

His answer to his critics was remorseless.

”We must fight to win. Grant is the ablest general we have. His losses are appalling. But the struggle is now on to the bitter end. Our resources of men and money are exhaustless. The South cannot replace her fallen sons. Her losses, therefore, are fatal!”

War had revealed to all at last that the Abolition crusade had been built on a lie. The negro had proven a bulwark of strength to the South.

Had their theories been true, had the slaves been beaten and abused the Black Bees would surely have swarmed. A single Southern village put to the torch by black hands would have done for Lee's army what no opponent had been able to do. It would have been destroyed in a night. The Confederacy would have gone down in hopeless ruin.

Not a black hand had been raised against a Southern man or woman in all the raging h.e.l.l. This fact is the South's vindication against the slanders of the Abolitionists. The negroes stood by their old masters.

They worked his fields; they guarded his women and children; they mourned over the graves of their fallen sons.