On the twenty-second of May the town rocked under the first assault. Four ironclads and a wooden gunboat—thirty-two guns—opened upon the river batteries. From the land the artillery began as well, a great force of artillery sending shot and shell against the Confederate centre and right and into the town beyond. At one o’clock came the first of three Federal charges, directed against the line of Stephen D. Lee. The assault was desperate, the repulse as determined. The grey guns did not spare to-day grape and canister. The grey musketry poured from the trenches volley after volley in the face of the foe. A blue storming party, Illinois and Ohio and Missouri, charged a redoubt in which the cannon had made a breach. They crossed the ditch, they mounted the earthen wall, they fixed two flags upon the parapet. They hurrahed in triumph. This angle was uncommanded by any grey work. The flags could be dislodged only by a countercharge and hand-to-hand fighting. Volunteers were called for, and there went a band of Waul’s Texans, led by Colonel Pettus of the Twentieth Alabama. The blue artillery opened upon them; there fell a fearful hail. The bullets of the sharpshooters, too, came against them like bees armed each with a mortal sting. The grey rushed on. They dislodged the blue from the fort, then fought them in the ditch below. They used shells like hand grenades, flinging them from the rampart. They took the flags, waved them on high, then sent them back to their colonel, who sent them to Stephen Lee. They beat back the blue storming party.... The grey beat back the whole wide, three blue charges, hurled them back upon their lines like torn waves from an iron coast. When dusk came and sullenly the firing ceased, the Federal dead and wounded lay thick, thick, up and down before the Confederate line, by ditch and wall,—perhaps two thousand dead and wounded. In the night-time some were taken away, but very, very many were left. The weather was deadly hot.