Confederate Left Disintegrates

Confederate Left Disintegrates. “Attached on my left, front, and rear”. , Confederate Gen. Bryan Grimes’s brigade was squarely in the path of the Union flank attack. The first force to strike his position was Union Col. Joseph Thoburn’s brigade, part of Crook’s command. “[The attack] came like an avalanche,” Grimes recalled. Helped by the thunderous fire of four cannon behind him, Grimes’s force initially held off the attackers; one Union soldier recalled, “A heavy fire of artillery and musketry kept up back for half an hour.” But pressure continued to build – from multiple directions. Gen. James Ricketts’s division from the VI Corps hit Grimes’s position from the north, and Crook’s other division, commanded by Col. Rutherford B. Hayes, struck from the southwest., “The enemy attacked me on my left flank, front and rear at the same time,” Grimes later recalled. His three western-facing regiments were forced to pull back, but for a time Grimes stubbornly held with his other two regiments. “I remained,” he recalled, “[and] fought until Ramseur came up and told me to save my brigade if possible.” The Federals were less than a hundred yards away when Grimes withdrew, his men “firing to the front and left” as they marched, keeping what order they could amidst the madness. Grimes had difficulty walking, as he had fallen in the trenches and sprained his ankle. He found an artillery horse and “put spur” to it when “the Yankees were then not over fifty yards” away, running a “gauntlet [of fire] through” an open field of two hundred yards to rejoin his troops. He tried to rally his men, “but the troops on all sides were too much demoralized to make a successful fight . . . and I was carried along in the current.”