What followed June 3 was a preview of a war fifty years off. The two armies settled into their trenches a few hundred yards apart and stayed there for over a week, and the character of the fighting changed completely. There was no more maneuver, no more charging, just constant sharpshooting, two lines of dug-in men so close and so alert that a soldier on either side could not lift his head above the parapet in daylight without inviting a bullet. Men ate, slept, and relieved themselves in the trench. This is the part of Cold Harbor that historians point to as a foreshadowing of World War I: the fortified lines, the futility of the charge already proven, and then the long, grinding, head-down stalemate that proof produced. The future was visible in the Virginia dirt in June 1864, and it was miserable.

The cruelest part of those days was out in the open ground between the trenches. Hundreds of Union wounded, the men cut down in the June 3 charge, lay in the no-man’s-land in front of Lee’s works, too close to the rebel line for anyone to reach them in daylight without being shot. They needed a truce, a temporary ceasefire to let stretcher parties go out and bring them in. The truce did not come. From June 5 to June 7, Grant and Lee traded notes about it, and the negotiation stalled, partly because Grant was reluctant to request a formal ceasefire in words that would read, to the world, as admitting he had been beaten. So the notes went back and forth while the men lay in the sun. By the time an arrangement was finally reached, it was too late for almost all of them. Nearly every wounded man out there had already died of his wounds, of thirst, of days of exposure between the lines. Grant himself recorded afterward that there were many dead and wounded men between the lines who could not be reached, and that when parties finally went out, all but a tiny handful had died. Whatever the exact arithmetic of June 3, the men who lay untended in front of the works for days are the part of Cold Harbor that no revised casualty count makes any easier.

On the night of June 12, the trenches in front of the Federals fell silent in a way that took the Confederates a while to notice. Under cover of darkness, Grant pulled the Army of the Potomac out of its lines and started it moving southeast, toward the Chickahominy River and the James beyond. Cold Harbor, as a battle, was over. As a turning point, it was just beginning to do its work.