Again, at four o'clock, after this interval of comparative quiet, the thunder of battle crashed and rolled. General Lee, himself, fought Longstreet's Corps. The attack was fierce, obstinate, and fearfully bloody. Wilkinson, of the Army of the Potomac, an eye-witness of this charge, says, in his book, "Recollections of a Private Soldier": "The Confederate fire resembled the fury of hell in its intensity, and was deadly accurate" and that "the story of this fight could afterwards be read by the windrows of dead men." As to its effect he also says: "We could not check the Confederate advance and they forced us back, and back, and back. The charging Confederates broke through the left of the Ninth Corps and would have cut the army in twain, if not caught on the flank, and driven back. Massed for the attack on the Sixth Corps, they were skillfully launched, and ably led, and they struck with terrific violence against Shaler's and Seymour's Brigades, which were routed, with a loss of four thousand prisoners. The Confederates came within an ace of routing the Sixth Corps. Both their assaults along our line were dangerously near being successful." Such was the description of a brave enemy, an eye-witness of this assault. At last, as dark fell, the fire slackened and died out. The Battle of the Wilderness was done. Grant was pinned into the thickets, hardly able to stand Lee's attack, no thoroughfare to the front and twenty odd thousand of his men dead, wounded and gone. That was about the situation when dark fell on the 6th of May! That night we drew off some distance to the right, and lay down, supperless, on the ground around our guns; it was very dark and cloudy and soon began to rain. There had been too much powder burnt around there during the last two days for it to stay clear. And so, as it always did, just after heavy firing, the clouds poured down water through the dark night. Lying out exposed on the untented ground, with only one blanket to cover with, we got soaking wet, and stayed so. The comfortless night gave way, at last, to a comfortless day--May 7th--gloomy, lowering, and raining, off and on, till late in the evening. During the morning, a little desultory firing was heard in front, and then all was quiet and still. We knew enough to know that Grant's push was over at this point. Some of us had gone up to look at the ground over which Longstreet had driven the enemy yesterday. We knew that the Federal troops could never be gotten back over that awful, corpse-covered ground to attack the men who had driven them. We knew we had to fight somewhere else, but where? By and by, talk began to circulate among the men that Spottsylvania, or around near Fredericksburg, might be the place. Of one thing we were all satisfied, that we would know soon enough.