It was in this Wilderness that Lee’s columns struck Grant’s in flank, and for two days a battle raged there, of which, for difficulty of conditions, there is scarcely a parallel in the history of warfare. The men could not see each other at a distance of more than a few rods. Regiments, struggling through the tangled vines and underbrush, came unexpectedly upon regiments of the enemy and fought desperately for the possession of the ground, neither knowing how much or how little the holding, the conquest, or the loss of the position involved might signify in a military way. Orderly fighting was utterly out of the question. Not only was it impossible for corps commanders to handle their troops with co-operative intent; even brigades were so broken up, and their several parts so hopelessly separated and lost to each other in the thickets, that their commanders knew neither when nor where nor how to set one regiment to reinforce another at a critical juncture. It was a veritable Donnybrook Fair on a large scale, where the only strategy consisted in pushing forward, and the only tactics in striking with all possible might at the enemy, wherever he was found. The fighting was desperate on both sides. It was such fighting as only the most hardened veterans could have been expected to do under circumstances so unfavourable, such fighting as would have been simply impossible at any earlier stage of the war. To valour these two armies had added discipline and long use in war. Their determination was that of veterans, their courage that of matchless heroes, their endurance that of insensate machines. Here for the first time the two greatest armies of modern history had met in their perfection of discipline, of experience in war, and of that high courage which makes no distinction between the facing of death and the confronting of a summer shower. To these war-seasoned men on either side the hum of bullets meant no more than the buzzing of mosquitoes; battle, no more than a breeze.