Lee was not ready to assault with his whole army till the afternoon of July 1st. An artillery duel was kept up during the forenoon, but the Confederate commander did not succeed in destroying the National batteries, as he hoped to: on the contrary, he saw his own disabled, one after another. The signal for the infantry attack was to be the usual yell, raised by Armistead's division on the right and taken up by the successive divisions along the line. But the Confederate line was separated by thick woods; there was long waiting for the signal; some of the generals thought they heard it, and some advanced without hearing it. The consequence was a series of separate attacks, some of them repeated three or four times, and every time a concentrated fire on the attacking column and a bloody repulse. The men themselves began to see the hopelessness of it, while their officers were still urging them to renewed efforts. "Come on, come on, my men," said one Confederate colonel, with the grim humor of a soldier; "do you want to live forever?" There were some brief counter-charges, in one of which the colors were taken from a North Carolina regiment; but in general the National troops only maintained their ground, and though fighting was kept up till nine o'clock in the evening, the line--as {160} General Webb, then assistant chief of artillery, tells us--was never for one instant broken or the guns in danger. This battle cost Lee five thousand men, and at its close he gave up the pursuit. The National loss was less than one-third as great. That night McClellan withdrew his army to Harrison's Landing, on the James, where he had fixed his base of supplies and where the gunboats could protect his position. This retreat is known as the Seven Days, and the losses are figured up at fifteen thousand two hundred and forty-nine on the National side, and somewhat over nineteen thousand on the Confederate. [Illustration: GRAPEVINE BRIDGE.]