By noon even Grant, who rarely knew when he was beaten, knew that he was beaten here. The firing sank away. “The dead and dying lay in front of the Confederate lines in triangles, of which the apexes were the bravest men who came nearest to the breastworks under the withering, deadly fire.” Dead and wounded and missing, ten thousand men in blue felt the full force of that hour. Stubborn to the end, it was two days before Grant would send a flag of truce and ask permission to bury his dead and gather the wounded who had not raved themselves to death. “Cold Harbour!” he said, much later in his life; “Cold Harbour is, I think, the only battle I ever fought that I would not fight over again under the circumstances!” “In the opinion of a majority of its survivors,” comments a Federal general, “the battle of Cold Harbour never should have been fought. It was the dreary, dismal, bloody, ineffective close of the Lieutenant-General’s first campaign with the Army of the Potomac, and corresponded in all its essential features with what had preceded it. The wide and winding path through the tangled Wilderness and the pines of Spottsylvania, which that army had cut from the Rapidan to the Chickahominy, had been strewn with the bodies of thousands of brave men, the majority of them wearing the Union blue.” The Campaign of the Thirty Days was ended. Fifty-four thousand men was the loss of the blue; something over half that number the loss of the grey. Eighty thousand men lay dead, or writhing in war-hospitals, or sat bowed in war-prisons. From the Atlantic to the Far West the current of human being in these States was troubled. There grew a sickness of feeling. The sun seemed to warm less strongly and the moon to shine less calmly. As always in war, the best and bravest from the first were taking flight; many and many of the good and brave were left, but they began to be conscious of a loneliness. “_All, all are gone—the old, familiar faces!_” And over the land sounded the mourning of homes—the mourning of the mothers and daughters of men. In the South life sank a minor third. The chords resounded still, but the wrists that struck were growing weak. _Largo ... Largo._