abatis.
Burnside's New England veterans rushed the crater. A huge hole had been
torn in Lee's fortifications one hundred yards long and sixty feet wide
and twenty-five feet in depth.

The hole proved a grave. The charging troops floundered in its spongy,
blood-soaked sides. They stumbled and fell into its pit. The regiments
in the rear, rushing through the smoke and stumbling over the mangled
pieces of flesh of Elliott's three hundred men who had been torn to
pieces, were on top of the line in front before they could clear the
crumbling walls.

When the charging hosts at last reached the firm ground inside the
Confederate lines, the men in gray were rallying. Their guns had been
trained on the yawning chasm now a struggling, squirming, cursing mass
of blue. Slowly order came out of chaos and Burnside's men swung to the
right and to the left and swept Lee's trenches for three hundred yards
in each direction. The charging regiments poured into them and found the
second Confederate line. Elliott's men who yet lived, driven from their
outer line by the resistless rush of the attack, retreated to a deep
ravine, rallied and held this third line.

Lee reached the field and took command. Mahone's men came to the rescue
marching with swift, steady tread. They took their position on the crest
which commanded the open space toward the captured trenches.

As Wright's brigade moved into position, the Black Battalions were
ordered to charge. They had been hurried through the crater and into
the trenches on the right and left. At the signal they swarmed over the
works, with a voodoo yell, and in serried black waves, charged the men
in gray. In broad daylight the Southerners saw for the first time the
plan of the dramatic attack.

The white men of the South shrieked an answer and gripped their muskets.
The cry they gave came down the centuries from three thousand years of
history. It came from the hearts of a conquering race of men. They had
heard the Call of the Blood of the Race that rules the world.

Without an order from their commanders, with a single impulse, the whole
Southern line leaped from their cover and dashed on the advancing Black
Legions in a counter charge so swift, so terrible, there was but a
single crash and the yell of white victory rang over the field. The
Blacks broke and piled pell mell into the trenches and on into the hell
hole of the crater.

Fifty of Lee's guns were now pouring a steady stream of sh