Again Lee had placed his guns and infantry in a fiery crescent on the hills arranged to catch both flanks and front of an advancing army.
Grant"s soldiers knew that grim work had been cut out for them on that fatal morning the third day of June. As John Vaughan walked along the lines the night before he saw thousands of silent men busy with their needle and thread sewing their names on their underclothing.
The hot, close weather of the preceding days had ended in a grateful rain at five o"clock, which continued through the night and brought the tired, suffering men gracious relief.
Grant decided to a.s.sault the whole Confederate front and gave his orders for the attack at the first streak of dawn at four-thirty.
The charging blue hosts literally walked into the crater of a volcano flaming in their faces and pouring tons of steel and lead into their stricken flanks. Nothing like it had ever before been seen in the history of war.
_Ten thousand men in blue fell in twenty minutes!_
The battle was practically over at half past seven o"clock.
General Smith received an order from Meade to renew the a.s.sault and flatly refused.
The scene which followed has no parallel in the records of human suffering. Its horror is inconceivable and unthinkable. Through the summer nights the shrieks and groans of the wounded and dying rose in pitiful endless waves. And no hand was lifted to save. For three days they lay begging for water, groaning and dying where they had fallen. It was certain death to venture in that storm-swept s.p.a.ce. Only a few brave men fought their way through to rescue a fallen comrade.
It was not until the 7th that a truce was arranged to clear this shamble and then every man in blue was dead save two. Everywhere blood, blood, blood in dark slippery pools--dead horses--dead men--smashed guns, legs, arms, torn and mangled pieces of bodies--the earth plowed with shot and sh.e.l.l.
Thirty days had pa.s.sed since Grant met Lee in the tangled Wilderness and the Northern army had lost sixty thousand men, two thousand a day.
It is small wonder that he decided not to try longer "to fight it out on that line."
Lee had put out of combat as many men for his opponent as he had under his command at any time and his army with the reinforcements he had received was now as strong as the day he met Grant.
For twelve days the two armies lay in their entrenchments on this field of death while the Federal Commander arranged a new plan of campaign.
The sharpshooting was incessant. No man in all the line of blue could stand erect and live an instant. Soldiers whose time of service had expired and were ordered home, had to crawl on their hands and knees through the trenches to the rear.
The new Commander, on whose genius the President and the people had planted their brightest hopes, had just reached the spot where McClellan stood in June, 1862. And he might have gotten there by the James under cover of his gunboats without the loss of a single life.
Again John Vaughan"s memory turned to McClellan with desperate bitterness. The longer he brooded over the hideous scenes of the past month, the higher rose his blind rage against the President.
CHAPTER x.x.xIII
THE BROTHERS MEET
When Julius, who had returned to John Vaughan"s service, saw those piles of dead men on the field of Cold Harbor he lost faith in the Union Cause. He made up his mind that the past month"s work had more than paid for that letter to the President and he took to the woods on his own hook.
He lay down to sleep the night he deserted in a clump of trees near the Confederate outposts and rested his head on a pillow of pine straw. When he waked in the morning at dawn he felt something tickle his nose. He cautiously reached one hand up to see what it was and felt a lock of hair. He rose slowly, fearing to look till he had gained his feet. He turned his eyes at last and saw that he had been sleeping on a dead man"s head protruding through the shallow dirt and pine straw that had been hastily thrown over it the first day of the battle.
With a yell of terror he started on a run for his life.
He never stopped until he had flanked Lee"s army by a wide swing, made his way to the rear and joined the Confederacy.
Grant had now changed his plan of campaign. He determined to capture Petersburg by a _coup_ and cut the communication of Lee and Richmond with the South. The _coup_ failed. The ragged remnants of Lee"s army which had been left there to defend it, held the trenches until reinforcements arrived.
He determined to take it by a resistless concerted a.s.sault. On the 16th he threw three of his army corps on Beauregard"s thin lines before Petersburg, capturing four redoubts. At daylight, on the 17th, he again hurled his men on Beauregard and drove his men out of his first line of defense. All day the defenders held their second line, though Grant"s crack divisions poured out their blood like water. As night fell the dead were once more piled high on the Federal front and the Confederate dead filled the trenches.
As the third day dawned the fierce, a.s.sault was renewed, but Lee had brought up Anderson"s Corps with Kershaw and Field"s division and the blue waves broke against the impregnable grey ranks and rolled back, leaving the dead in dark heaps.
As the shadows of night fell, Grant withdrew his shattered lines to their trenches.
_He had lost ten thousand five hundred more men and had failed._
He began to burrow his fortifications into the earth around Petersburg and try by siege what had been found impossible by a.s.sault. Further and further crept his blue lines with pick and axe and spade and shovel, digging, burrowing, piling their dirt and timbers. Before each blue rampart silently grew one in grey until the two siege lines stretched for thirty-seven miles in bristling, flaming semicircle covering both Richmond and Petersburg.
Again Grant planned a _coup_. He chose the role of the fox this time instead of the lion. He selected the key of Lee"s long lines of defense and set a regiment of Pennsylvania miners to work digging a tunnel under the Confederate fort known as "Elliot"s Salient," which stood but two hundred yards in front of Burnside"s corps.
The tunnel was finished, the mine ready, the fuses set, and eight thousand pounds of powder planted in the earth beneath the unsuspecting Confederates.
Hanc.o.c.k"s division with Sheridan"s cavalry were sent to make a demonstration against Richmond and draw Lee"s main army to its defense.
The ruse was partly successful. There were but eighteen thousand behind the defenses of Petersburg on the dark night when Grant ma.s.sed fifty thousand picked men before the doomed fort. The pioneers with their axes cleared the abatis and opened the way for the charging hosts. Heavy guns and mortars were planted to sweep the open s.p.a.ce beyond the Salient and beat back any attempted counter charge.
The time set for the explosion was just before dawn. The fuse was lit and fifty thousand men stood gripping their guns, waiting for the shock.
A quarter of an hour pa.s.sed and nothing happened. An ominous silence brooded over the dawning sky. The only sounds heard were the twitter of waking birds in the trees and hedgerows. The fuse had failed. Two heroic men crawled into the tunnel and found it had spluttered out in a damp spot but fifty feet from the powder. It required an hour to secure and plant a new fuse. Day had dawned. Just in front of John Vaughan"s regiment a Confederate spy was caught. He could hear every word of the pitiful tragedy.
He was a handsome, brown-eyed youngster of eighteen.
He glanced pathetically toward the doomed fort, and shook his head:
"Fifteen minutes more and I"d have saved you, boys!"
He turned then to the executioners:
"May I have just a minute to pray?"
"Yes."
He knelt and lifted his head, the fine young lips moving in silence as the first rays of the rising sun flooded the scene with splendor.
"May I write just a word to my mother and to my sweetheart?" he asked with a smile. "They"re just over there in Petersburg."
"Yes."
They gave him a piece of paper and he wrote his last words of love, and in a moment was swinging from the limb of a tree. Only a few of the more thoughtful men paid any attention. It was nothing. Such things happened every day. G.o.d only kept the records.
The new fuse was set and lighted. The minutes seemed hours as the men waited breathlessly. With a dull m.u.f.fled roar from the centre of the earth beneath their very feet the fort rose two hundred feet straight into the sky, driven by a tower of flame that stood stark and red in the heavens. And then with blinding crash the mighty column of earth, guns, timbers and three hundred grey bodies sank into the yawning crater. The pit was sixty-five feet wide and three hundred feet long.
The explosion had been a complete success. The undermined fort had been wiped from the landscape. A great gap opened in Lee"s lines marked by the grave of three hundred of his men.
Burnside"s division rushed into the crater and climbed through the breach. His men were met promptly by Ransom"s brigade of North Carolinians and held. The Union support became entangled in the hole, stumbled and fell in confusion.
General Mahone"s brigades hastily called, rushed into position, and a general Confederate charge was ordered. In silence, their arms trailing by their sides, they quickly crossed the open s.p.a.ce and fell like demons on the confused blue lines which were driven back into the crater and slaughtered like sheep. The Confederate guns were trained on this yawning pit whose edges now bristled with flaming muskets. Regiment after regiment of blue were hurled into this h.e.l.l hole to be torn and cut to pieces.