Free Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination That Changed America Forever by Bill O'Reilly, Martin Dugard Page B

watching. They stand shoulder to shoulder, their line of battle almost two miles wide. Thus are 4,000 of Lee’s troops poised to meet the Union attack.
    Behind them, rebel wagons are burning on the double bridges above Sayler’s Creek. To the left of the Confederate force is the Appomattox River. Straight in front of them are thousands of advancing blue-clad Yankees. At first, the Confederate infantry line holds. But under withering artillery fire the men begin to fall back.
    It is a mile-long retreat over open ground that offers almost no cover. The rebel infantry topple the wagons that have made it across the double bridges, using them as an impromptu breastworks, hiding behind a spoked wheel or a tilted axle. The sun cannot set quickly enough for these men. With 10,000 Union troops almost on top of them, darkness is the rebels’ only hope.
     
     
    Night does not come soon enough, and the fight begins. Almost immediately, the Confederates take incredible losses. Artillery and
bullets level any man who dares to stand still. Many soldiers quit the war right then and there, convinced that this endless wave of blue is unbeatable. They see the wagons afire, and hear the explosions of the ammunition inside, and know in an instant that of the three things a soldier needs to survive in wartime—bullets, sleep, and food—they have none.
    Others, however, are more game. They abandon the cover of the wagons and begin to splash across Sayler’s Creek. They are rewarded.
    Just as the North surges forward, hope arrives. It comes in the form of Robert E. Lee, who has spent the afternoon on horseback, trying to find his own army. He sits astride Traveller, looking down from a nearby ridgeline. “The disaster which had overtaken the army was in full view,” one of his officers will later write. “Teamsters with their teams and dangling traces, retreating infantry without guns, many without hats, a harmless mob, with massive columns of the enemy moving orderly on.”
    This “harmless mob,” Lee realizes, is his own Army of Northern Virginia.
    “My God,” says a horrified Lee, staring down at the columns of smoke and tongues of flames and stacks of bodies—so many that the ground along both branches of Sayler’s Creek is a carpet of gray and blue. “Has the army been dissolved?”
     
     
    Two miles south of Lee’s viewpoint, and a half mile north of where General Custer still has a Confederate force pinned down, perhaps the most ferocious battle ever seen on American soil is unfolding.
    “At three o’clock in the afternoon,” one Confederate soldier will remember, “we reached Sayler’s Creek, a small creek that at the time had overflowed its banks from the continuous rains of the past few days, giving the appearance of a small river. We halted a few minutes then waded across this stream and took our positions on the rising ground one hundred yards beyond.”
    The hill is grassy, but the site of the Confederate stand is toward the back of the rise, under the cover of broom sedge and pine shrubs. Now the rebels hold the high ground. Any force attacking Lee’s army
of almost 4,000 will have to expose themselves to fire while wading the four-foot-deep morass of Sayler’s Creek. If they get across safely, they will then have to fight their way uphill to the rebel positions.
    “We threw ourselves prone upon the ground. Our battle line was long drawn out, exceedingly thin. Here we rested awaiting the attack, as the enemy had been following closely behind us,” a Confederate major will later chronicle.
    At five-thirty, the Union artillery opens fire on the grassy hill, lobbing shells at the Confederate positions from just four hundred yards away. The rebels have no artillery of their own and cannot fire back. The screams of the wounded are soon drowned out by the whistle and explosion of shells. All the Confederates can do is hug the ground and pray as the Union gunners take “their artillery practice without let or