Colonel Theodore Lyman, With Grant and Meade from the Wilderness to Appomattox, chapter 4, page 113

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[113] group, which was only reached by a fragment or two. None of us got hurt, but one horse was wounded and another killed. There I staid for five hours (very long ones), and pelted all the time,, but most of the balls flew too high, and, as is well known, shells make a horrid noise, but hurt comparatively few.

The attack on the Salient

All this time the enemy was rolling up his fresh troops and frantically endeavoring to regain that salient. He made as many as five desperate charges with the bayonet, but in vain. At one place called the “Corner” the lines stood within fifty feet of each other, for hours!¹ The breastwork

1 “The great historical fight of this day extended over a front of only 1000 to 1500 yards, along the faces of the salient, or the ‘Death-angle,’ as it was afterwards called. Within that narrow field two corps were piled up to assault and in support. Indeed we had too many troops, as the generals justly said. The lines got mixed and jammed together and were hard to handle. The amount of bullets fired may be known from the fact that a red oak, twenty-three inches in diameter, was reduced, about six feet from the ground, to a fibrous structure and blew down that night! Bodies that lay between the lines were shot to pieces and could only be raised in a blanket! The result was damaging to the enemy — very — but the army of Lee was not cut in two--an issue clearly looked for by Rawlins and some others of Grant's Staff, but not so confidently assumed by those who knew a little more.” --Lyman's Journal.

Atlantic Monthly. Press. 1922.

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Colonel Theodore Lyman, With Grant and Meade from the Wilderness to Appomattox
George R. Agassiz, Ed.

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Colonel Theodore Lyman, With Grant and Meade from the Wilderness to Appomattox George R. Agassiz, Ed.

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Colonel Theodore Lyman, With Grant and Meade from the Wilderness to Appomattox
George R. Agassiz, Ed.