June 4, 1864---The Battle of Cold Harbor (Day Five: Trench Warfare)

JUNE 4, 1864:            

The Battle of Cold Harbor  (Day Five):           

In an example of the pillorying Grant is going to receive in the Press, the Richmond Times-Dispatch files the following report on the Battle of Cold Harbor:

  

The ground on which the battle was fought was the same with that on which the battle of '62 was fought. But the positions were reversed, we holding McClellan's and Grant holding Lee's. According to the accounts of prisoners Grant on the night of Thursday caused a quart of whisky to be distributed to each of the soldiers, and about four o'clock yesterday morning, having primed them well for the work, commenced an assault upon our works. repulsed again and again, with unprecedented slaughter, he constantly renewed the attack with fresh troops, sending his men up in columns ten deep, and, in great part, so drunk that they knew not what they were about, and pressed on with the most reckless audacity. Nothing could exceed the coolness with which they were received by our troops, who, standing behind their breastworks and suffering but little, shot them down by thousands, with as much deliberation as though they were firing at so many marks. At one o'clock the action ceased along the whole line, our troops having repulsed the enemy, who left several thousand behind him, dead or wounded, on the field. Gen. lee afterwards rode over to the field, and declared that the slaughter far exceeded that of the 12th of May.

The modern-day remains of a trench at Cold Harbor

In actuality, the bitterly sober Union troops spend the nighttime digging entrenchments. Soon, the trenches stretch for miles from Old Cold Harbor to New Cold Harbor. A seemingly-endless period of misery ensues for both sides. Lee’s earthworks form a labyrinth of interconnected trenches, rifle pits and burrows three lines deep. The Union’s initial trenches are not so complex in plan, but they are equally miserable --- filthy ditches more like elongated and interconnected foxholes, where men skulk just beneath the level of the earth like the rats they are trying desperately to avoid. 

Trench warfare is always crude and dehumanizing to the combatants. But Civil War trench warfare lacks even the crass refinements later adopted in the trenches of World War I. Sanitation is unknown. The walls of the trenches are shored with a hodgepodge of materials that make movement through the trenches difficult --- supporting timbers stolen from fences, the floors of supply wagons, huge rocks hauled into place by main force, uprooted tree stumps, and even large tree branches. Occasionally, the walls give way, and men are buried alive.  

The Cold Harbor trenches lack “duckboards” --- a raised wooden flooring which allows troops to walk on a smooth surface while allowing runoff and rainwater to collect and drain away from underfoot. The duckboards the Civil War troopers do not have would also keep the rats, snakes, spiders and worms out of their sight, at least during daylight. 

The average trench trooper at Cold Harbor is sleeping on the muddy dirt at the bottom of the trench in company with all sorts of critters among stagnant pools of water, urine and floating human waste. Flea, tick, spider and centipede bites are common, as are attacks by rats.

A man daring enough to peer above the parapets will likely be drilled between the eyes by an enemy bullet. Artillery fire is trained to a nicety upon the enemy’s trenches, and the first wartime shouts of “incoming!” echo eerily across the field. Since the Confederacy is using many captured Union guns, it is difficult for the men --- reduced to a weary troglodytism --- to recognize one gun from another, and men are often blasted out of existence at complete unawares.         

All through the days and nights of June 3-5, the horrors of the trenches are punctuated by the screams of wounded, mostly Union, soldiers, who are lying in the heat and stench of No-Man’s Land, begging for water, begging for help, begging for a bullet to the head so as to be put out of their misery. Grant sends messages across the lines to Lee --- he is unwilling to couch his request to rescue his wounded in terms of a “truce” --- and Lee, who knows very well what Grant wants, is uncharacteristically obstinate, and even cruel. By the time Lee and Grant arrange a brief respite to recover the wounded, most of the men have died in agony.