an open field it entered a
pine-wood, passed down a gentle declivity and up a slight ascent. Here
the charge was checked. For seventy feet in front of the works the
trees had been felled, interlocking with each other and barring all
further advance. Two paths several yards apart, and wide enough for
four men to march abreast, led through the obstruction. Up these to
the foot of the works the brave men rushed but were swept away by a
converging fire. Unable to carry the intrenchments, I directed the men
to lie down and not return the fire. Opposite the right the works were
carried. The regiment was marched to the point gained and, moving to
the left, captured the point first attacked. In this position without
support on either flank the Second Connecticut fought till three A.M.,
when the enemy fell back to a second line of works."

The regimental history continues: "On the morning of the 2nd the
wounded who still remained were got off to the rear, and taken to the
Division Hospital some two miles back. Many of them had lain all
night, with shattered bones, or weak with loss of blood, calling
vainly for help, or water, or death. Some of them lay in positions so
exposed to the enemy's fire that they could not be reached until the
breastworks had been built up and strengthened at certain points, nor
even then without much ingenuity and much danger; but at length they
were all removed. Where it could be done with safety, the dead were
buried during the day. Most of the bodies, however, could not be
reached until night, and were then gathered and buried under cover of
the darkness."

The regiment's part in the charge of June 3rd, the disastrous movement
of the whole Union line against the Confederate works, which Grant
admitted never should have been made, was attended with casualties
which by comparison with the slaughter of the 1st seemed
inconsiderable. There were, in fact, losses in killed and wounded on
almost all of the twelve days of its stay at Cold Harbor, but the
fatal 1st of June greatly overshadowed the remaining time, and that
first action was indeed incomparably the most severe the Second
Connecticut ever saw. Its loss in killed and wounded, in fact, is said
to have been greater than that of any other Connecticut regiment in
any single battle.

The reputation of a fighting regiment, which its fallen leader had
predicted, was amply earned by that unfaltering advance against
intrenchments manned by Lee's vete