witnessed. The contested ground was literally piled with dead. There
was hand-to-hand fighting. Men bayoneted each other through the
crevices of the logs that had been piled up for defences. The storm
of battle swept back and forth until the salient gained that name of
"Death Angle" by which it will ever be known. The place became then
and there the bloodiest spot that ever was washed with human life in
America. The bushes and trees round about were literally shot away. At
one point an oak tree, more than eighteen inches in diameter, was
completely eaten off at the man-level by the bullet storm that beat
against it. That tree in its fall crushed several men of a South
Carolina regiment who still stood and fought in the death harvest that
was going on.

The counter assaults of the Confederates, however, were in vain. They
inflicted terrible losses, and were themselves mowed down by
thousands; but they could not and did not retake the angle. Hancock
and his heroes could not be dislodged. The battle of Spottsylvania
died away with the night into sullen and awful silence, which was
broken only by the groans of thousands of wounded men who could not be
recovered from the bloody earth on which they had fallen. The
antagonists lay crouching like lions, only a lion's spring apart, and
neither would suffer the other, even for the sake of their common
American humanity, to recover his dead.

In the retrospect it seems marvelous that within the memories of men
now living and not yet old, so awful a struggle as that of the Death
Angle in the Wilderness could have taken place between men of the same
race and language, born under the flag of the same Republic, and
cherishing the same sentiments and traditions and hopes.