As one looks back at all this, and clearly discerns Grant’s purpose and the means he used for its accomplishment, it is easy to see that both Lee and the Confederate cause were doomed in the very hour of Grant’s passage across the Rapidan. The only chance of any other issue lay in the remote possibility that the sixty thousand men of the Army of Northern Virginia should inflict a decisive and destructive defeat upon the one hundred and thirty thousand men of the Army of the Potomac at the outset of the campaign, and in that way bring hopeless discouragement at the North to their aid. This they did not succeed in doing at the Wilderness, and when, after two days’ battling there, Grant moved by his left flank to Spottsylvania Court House to join battle again, there was scarcely a veteran in the Virginia army who did not fully understand that the beginning of the end had come. Yet not one of them flinched from the further fighting because of its manifest hopelessness. Not one of them lost the courage of despair in losing hope. Perhaps there was no part of the titanic struggle which so honourably distinguished those men of the South as did that campaign in which they doggedly fought on after they had come to understand that their fighting was futile. It is natural enough that men should be brave when the lure of hope and the confident expectation of victory beckon them to the battle front, but only men of most heroic mould may be expected to fight with still greater desperation after all doors of hope are closed to them. From that hour when Grant moved from the Wilderness to Spottsylvania till the end came, nearly a year later, these men of the South did, and dared, and endured for love of honour alone, with no hope to inspire them, no remotest chance of ultimate success as the reward of their valour. Theirs was a pure heroism, untouched, untainted, unalloyed. After two days of such fighting as bulldogs do, the struggle in the Wilderness ended with no decisive advantage on either side. Grant had secured possession of roads leading out of the Wilderness. On the other hand Lee had succeeded in completely baffling his adversary’s strategic purpose, and was still in full possession of that region in his own rear which Grant had hoped to seize upon with decisive effect. Grant’s losses in killed, wounded, and prisoners greatly exceeded Lee’s; but as an offset, he could afford to lose more heavily than the Confederates, not only because his force outnumbered Lee’s by more than two to one, but also because he could repair all his losses by reinforcement, while Lee had no such resource.