The embankment itself was a frail structure of logs, from which the rain had washed away the greater part of the earth that was intended to give it a power of resistance against fire. Huddled on either side of it--the Federals on the one side and the Confederates on the other--they fought over and through it, throughout the hours of that terrible day. Sometimes they thrust their bayonets through the crevices in the log barrier, and thus ran each other through. Sometimes they fired through those crevices upon enemies less than ten feet away. Sometimes the men on one side or the other would suddenly mount upon the small parapet, and with bullet or bayonet, assail their adversaries on the other side. This spot in the annals of the war is fitly called "The bloody angle at Spottsylvania." The fighting there lasted throughout the day and until after midnight of the twelfth. It was a fighting of blind fury from beginning to end. It was such a struggle as few wars have ever given birth to, and it illustrated in the most conspicuous way imaginable that American heroism which made our war so terrible in its conduct, and so glorious in its memory. At every point in the bloody angle when the fighting was done dead men lay piled, one upon another, sometimes five deep. Wounded men were often imprisoned under the dead, unable to extricate themselves, at a time when there were none to rescue them. Every bush and every sapling that constituted the thicket there was cut away by a stream of bullets, as grass is before a mower's scythe. Even an oak tree nearly two feet thick was worn in two near its base by the continual and incessant stroke of leaden balls until it fell, crushing some of the Confederates who were fighting beneath its branches. Is not the question a pertinent one--what did the little charge of the six hundred at Balaklava amount to as an exhibition of human heroism in comparison with such a fight as this? Has the age of poetry passed? And have the poets forgotten their cunning that not one of them has ever yet celebrated in song such American deeds as these, or as Pickett's charge at Gettysburg, or as Grant's assault at Cold Harbor, or as the six matchless advances of the Federals upon Marye's Heights at Fredericksburg? Or is it merely that our poets have been embarrassed by the very richness of our Confederate war in deeds of derring-do? On neither side have the losses in this struggle at the death angle been separately computed with even such tolerable accuracy as might justify the historian in the use of round numbers. But the slaughter, it is certain, was as terrific as at any other point of fighting during the entire war, with the possible exception of Cold Harbor, a little later. After midnight the Confederates withdrew from the apex of the angle to their second line at its base, and for that day the fighting was over.