To meet this strategy General Lee undertook a bold operation on the twenty-fourth of March which was brilliantly, but in the end unsuccessfully, executed by General Gordon. His plan was by an attack upon the Federal left wing to compel Grant for a time to contract his lines on the left and thus to secure to the Confederates a way out of the net in which they had been enmeshed. The attack was made in the night, a fact which would have rendered it perilous in the extreme had the troops that made it been other than war-worn veterans. At the point selected for assault the Federal and Confederate lines lay within one hundred yards of each other, and both were strongly fortified. By an adroit movement the Confederates captured the whole body of Federal pickets and sent them as prisoners to the rear, thus reducing the distance between themselves and the earthworks to be assaulted to less than fifty yards. Then with a rush they hurled themselves upon the Federal works and carried them. For a time it seemed likely that they would crumple up the whole of Grant's left wing and compel the contraction of his lines by several miles. But General Parke, who commanded the Federal forces in that quarter, made hurried dispositions to check the Confederate assault, and after some hours of hard fighting, in which the Confederates lost 4,000 men and the Federals 2,000, the Federal lines were reëstablished. All this occurred just before Grant's final and decisive blow was delivered. Earlier in the war this conflict would have been everywhere heralded as a great battle. In the spring of 1865--so used had the country become to such things--it was a scarcely noticed incident in the siege operations about Petersburg. CHAPTER LIX THE END While all this was going on around Petersburg, Sherman, under Grant's instructions, was carrying out the other part of the lieutenant general's program. After securing possession of Savannah he pushed troops forward to Pocotaligo, a point on the Charleston and Savannah railroad about midway between the two cities. From that position he could move with equal ease against Charleston, Augusta, or Columbia and the cities and towns north of Columbia. General Joseph E. Johnston had been grudgingly recalled to the command of such Confederate forces as could be assembled in that quarter for the purpose of offering resistance to that advance northwardly which Sherman obviously intended. But for a time Johnston could not know or safely conjecture by which of the three lines of march that were equally open to him, Sherman would elect to move. Consequently for a time Johnston was compelled to scatter his meager forces widely, holding them in such readiness as he could for concentration when his enemy's purposes should be disclosed.