The dawn came up, crowned with pale violets, majestical and still. Upon the old woods, the old marshes, hung a mist, cool and silvery. There came a sweet cry of birds in the grey tree-tops. Lee’s long grey lines, concave to the foe, stretched from Alexander’s Bridge on the Chickahominy to the upper Totopotomoy. On the low earthworks hung the gossamers, dewy bright. Grant held the Sydnor’s Sawmill, Bethesda Church, and Old Cold Harbour line, roughly paralleling the other. But he was north of Lee; Lee was again between him and Richmond—Richmond so near now, so very near! Richmond was there before him—no room now for “swinging past,” and the lion was there, too, in the path. Grant attacked in column. Deep and narrow-fronted, he thrust against the grey earthworks like a giant mill-race rather than a wide ocean, like one solid catapult rather than a mailed fist at every door. Twenty deep, the Second and Sixth Corps poured into the depression that was the grey centre. Second and Sixth came on with a shout, and the grey answered with a shout and with every musket and cannon. Following the Second and Sixth the Eighteenth, phalanxed, dashed itself against a salient held by Kershaw.... The battle of Cold Harbour was the briefest, the direst! Death swung a scythe against the three corps. They were in the gulf of the grey, and Fate came upon them from three sides. In effect, it was all over in a very few minutes.... The shattered three corps fell back to what cover they could find. Here they fired ineffectively from this shelter and from that. Before them, between them and the Army of Northern Virginia, stretched the plain of their dead and dying, and both lay upon it like leaves in autumn. Orders came that the three corps should again attack. The more advanced commands obeyed by opening fire from behind what shelter they had found or could contrive, but there was no other movement. Put out a hand and the wind began to whistle and the air over that plain to grow dark with lead! Grant sent a third order. _Corps of Hancock, Smith, and Wright to advance to the charge along the whole line._ Corps commanders repeated the order to division commanders; division commanders repeated it to the brigadiers, but that was all. The three corps stood still. Statements, differing as to wording but tallying in meaning, travelled from grade to grade, back to Headquarters. “It is totally impossible, and the men know it. They are not to be blamed.”