e. 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 flashing
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 assault. 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
space. 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 Washington had stunned the Nation. Every city, town,
village, hamlet and country home was in mourning. A stream of protest
against the new Comman