mand, with 120,000 men present for
duty. Lee, heading an army of 62,000 veterans, engaged his new
antagonist without delay. For two days the battle raged in the gloomy
woods. There was no opportunity for brilliant manoeuvres. The men of the
two armies lay doggedly behind the trees, each blazing away through the
underbrush at an unseen foe, often but a few yards off, while a stream
of mangled forms borne on stretchers came steadily pouring to the rear.
The tide of battle surged this way and that, with no decisive advantage
for either side.

But Grant, as Lee said of him, "was not a retreating man." If he had not
beaten, neither had he been beaten. Advance was the word. On the night
of the 7th he began that series of "movements by the left flank" which
was to force Lee forever from the Rappahannock front. The army stretched
nearly north and south, facing west. Warren's corps, at the extreme
right, quietly withdrew from the enemy's front, and marching south took
a position beyond Hancock's, hitherto the left. Sedgwick's corps
followed. By this sidling movement the army worked its way south, all
the while presenting an unbroken front to the enemy. Yet, on reaching
Spottsylvania, Grant found Lee's army there before him. Sharp fighting
began again on the 9th and continued three days, but was indecisive,
mainly from the wild nature of the country, heavily timbered, with only
occasional clearings.

[Illustration: Officer with arms outstretched, after being shot.]
Death of General Sedgwick at Spottsylvania. May 9, 1864.

An early morning attack on the 12th carried a salient angle in the
centre of the Confederate line, securing 4,000 prisoners and twenty
guns. All that day and far into the night Lee desperately strove to
dislodge the assailants from this "bloody angle." Five furious charges
were stubbornly repulsed, the belligerents between these grimly facing
each other from lines of rifle-pits often but a few feet apart. Bullets
flew thick as hail, a tree eighteen inches through being cut clean off
by them. Great heaps of dead and wounded lay between the lines, and "at
times a lifted arm or a quivering limb told of an agony not quenched by
the Lethe of death around." Lee did not give up this death-grapple till
three o'clock in the morning, when he fell back to a new position. His
losses here in killed and wounded were about 5,000; Grant's about 6,000.

Rains now compelled both armies to remain quiet for several days.
Me