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GOD Family Country and Dogs. At TESLA since 2011. I publish History articles daily. Long Arc of History, Battle Day and Murders.

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In the 1930s, a patient lying on Sigmund Freud's couch in Vienna was never alone with the doctor. A big chow named Jofi lay on the carpet, and she kept the time.

Freud had never owned a dog until late in life. His daughter Anna brought home a German Shepherd named Wolf in the mid-1920s, and the old man was charmed. In 1928 a friend of Anna's, Dorothy Burlingham, gave him a chow named Lun-Yu. Lun-Yu was hit by a train about fifteen months later, and Freud mourned her as he would a person. Seven months after that he took in her sister. He named her Jofi, from the Hebrew word for "beauty."

Jofi went to work with him. She lay in the consulting room through his sessions, and he said he never needed to look at his watch. When the fifty minutes were up, she got to her feet and yawned. Freud also liked to speak through her. A patient, Dr. Roy Grinker, later wrote that if Jofi scratched to be let out, Freud would say, "Jofi doesn't approve of what you're saying." If she wanted back in, he would say, "Jofi has decided to give you another chance."

At the table she was a bigger problem. Freud's cancerous jaw made eating painful, and he often pushed his plate her way, so Jofi ate a good share of his dinner. When he went to Berlin for treatment, she stayed in a kennel because his wife, Martha, did not care for dogs, and he wrote home to ask, "Is anyone visiting Jofi? I miss her a great deal."

Through years of surgery and pain, he told his friend Princess Marie Bonaparte that he wished she could see "what sympathy Jofi shows me during these hellish days, as if she understood everything."

In January 1937 Jofi had ovarian cysts removed. The operation went well, but she died of a heart attack three days later, on January 11. Freud wrote to Arnold Zweig that one could not easily get over seven years of intimacy.

He took another chow, Lun, and in 1938 the family left Nazi-occupied Vienna for London. Lun had to sit out six months of quarantine, and Freud, who died in 1939, lived to see him released.

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Advice from Poppy and Frisco: Bring a friend. Two noses make a much stronger argument.

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https://t.co/SN7D5sQvXe

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At least 198 people were charged.

Witnesses were few and afraid, and the trial moved so slowly that a senator remarked that it could take 200 years. Andal Ampatuan Sr. died of liver cancer in July 2015 before it ended.

On 19 December 2019 Judge Jocelyn Solis-Reyes read her verdict at a special session in Taguig. Twenty-eight people were convicted of 57 counts of murder and sentenced to reclusion perpetua, up to 40 years without parole, among them Andal Jr., his brother Zaldy Ampatuan and six other members of the clan. Fifteen more were convicted as accessories and given six to ten years.

Fifty-six were acquitted, including the brother Datu Sajid Islam Ampatuan. The judge ordered about 155.5 million pesos in damages to the victims' families.

Killing to verdict: 10 years, 1 month.

As of the most recent reporting, from November 2025, the Court of Appeals had still not ruled on the appeals. Between 80 and 88 of the accused have never been caught. As of that reporting, the families said they hadn't been paid the damages.

The Committee to Protect Journalists called it the single deadliest event for journalists since it began keeping records in 1992. At home it made the private armies of provincial warlords a national scandal, exposed how an unreported arsenal could sit behind a governor's wall, and broke the Ampatuans' hold on the governorship. Mangudadatu was elected governor in 2010 and served until 2019.

The National Press Club of the Philippines put up a memorial in Manila that lists the 32 media workers by name. At the University of the Philippines a tree was planted on the third anniversary, with a sign that says there is no Filipino word for impunity.

They went to file a form, and the graves were already dug.

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On the morning of 23 November 2009, a convoy of seven vehicles set out across southern Mindanao to file a candidate's papers.

It was sent that way because its organizers hoped women and reporters would be safe on the road. By nightfall 58 people were dead, 32 of them journalists and media workers, and the graves had been dug two days before. It was the deadliest attack on reporters ever recorded.

For years the Ampatuan family ran Maguindanao province in the southern Philippines. Andal Ampatuan Sr. had been governor since 1998, and he was elected three times unopposed.

Eighteen of the province's mayors came from his clan. The family was a major ally of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, and in 2004 she won 69 per cent of the province's vote.

By 2009 the governor couldn't run again. He wanted his son, Andal Ampatuan Jr., the mayor of Datu Unsay, to take his place. Esmael "Toto" Mangudadatu, the vice mayor of Buluan, decided to run against him.

Mangudadatu said he had been threatened. Rival politicians, he said, had told him they would chop him to pieces if he filed. He asked the regional police for protection that week, and the request was turned down.

So Mangudadatu changed the plan. He wouldn't go himself. His wife Genalyn, two of his sisters and an aunt would go, along with female lawyers, to file his certificate of candidacy at the Commission on Elections office in Shariff Aguak.

Some reports say he was counting on an Islamic tradition that women are not to be harmed. He also invited 37 journalists to come along, because he thought witnesses would keep the peace.

Before they left, Aquiles Zonio, a reporter for the Philippine Daily Inquirer, texted the army's 6th Infantry Division and was told the road was safe. The convoy left about half an hour late, around 9:30. It had five vans, a DZRH reporter's SUV and a UNTV van.

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At about 10 a.m. the convoy reached a police checkpoint in the town of Ampatuan, at Barangay Masalay, about ten kilometers from Shariff Aguak.

At least ten vehicles of armed men pulled up and surrounded it.

Prosecutors said Andal Ampatuan Jr. led them. The police at the checkpoint were told to step aside.

Two other vehicles had the bad luck to be there. One held a government worker who had suffered a mild stroke that morning, on his way to a hospital in Cotabato City, with his wife, two co-workers and a driver.

The other was driven by an employee of a statistics office. The gunmen took them for part of the convoy and seized them too.

The gunmen drove the captured vehicles to a remote area. At about 10:15 Genalyn Mangudadatu managed to call her husband. She told him they were being held by at least 100 armed men, and that she recognized Ampatuan Jr.'s men.

The call cut off. Gunfire began around 10:30.

The court record shows that several of the women were sexually assaulted before they were killed. That detail isn't included here.

Three graves had been dug two days earlier with a backhoe that carried the name of the provincial government. The killers began burying the victims, and some of the vehicles, in them. They stopped when they learned soldiers were coming.

Soldiers reached the site at about 3 p.m., more than four hours after the shooting. Thirty-five bodies were in the graves.

By the authorities' count, 58 people had died. The 58th, a 61-year-old photographer for the Midland Review named Reynaldo Momay, was never found, except for his dentures. His family is still asking a court to count him.

On 24 November President Arroyo declared a state of emergency in the province. Her party threw the Ampatuans out the next day. On 26 November Ampatuan Jr. surrendered and was flown to Manila.

He said he had been at the provincial capitol that morning and blamed Muslim rebels. The rebels called that absurd.

On 4 December Arroyo put Maguindanao under martial law, and she lifted it on 13 December. Soldiers raided clan homes and a warehouse.

They found more than 330,000 rounds of ammunition and enough guns to arm a battalion. At the time, Philippine law let local officials buy as many weapons as they liked without having to report them.

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The British could not afford to win like that again.

By 3 November, of the 84 infantry battalions the BEF had brought to France, 75 had fewer than 300 men left, and 18 had fewer than 100. Fabeck's group had lost 17,250 men in five days, and still hadn't broken through.

So the Germans prepared one more try, and this time they sent the Prussian Guard. On the morning of 11 November, after the heaviest bombardment of the battle, the Guard division and five other corps attacked from Messines to Polygon Wood. Thirteen Guard battalions came along the Menin Road, and FitzClarence's brigade, with a little over 800 men, took the blow.

The Guard broke through in three places, and some of them got into Nonne Bosschen, "Nuns' Wood," a triangle of oaks and chestnuts that had belonged to a Benedictine convent four hundred years before. Some got almost to the British guns, where the gunners stopped them with point-blank fire.

In the afternoon the 2nd Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, fewer than 400 men, attacked the wood from the north-west with a company of the Northamptonshires on their flank, and drove the Guard out. William Barnes Wollen painted the fight in 1916.

It's a fanciful picture, made to honor the regiment, not a record of what the wood looked like that day. The Germans kept only a stretch of the old British front line.

FitzClarence tried a counter-attack the next day, and he was killed on 12 November, leading from the front.

The fighting went on in local actions until about 22 November. The weather turned cold and rain gave way to snow.

Men stood in trenches half full of freezing water and fell asleep on their feet. On 17 November the German Fourth Army was ordered to stop attacking, and two of its corps were sent east.

Nobody won. The German armies lost about 80,000 men at Ypres, and 134,315 across Belgium and northern France from 15 October to 24 November. British losses at Ypres were around 54,000 to 58,000.

The French lost between 50,000 and 85,000, and the Belgian army was reduced to a shadow. Falkenhayn had accepted by 8 November that Ypres was out of reach. Within weeks the line he'd tried to break ran in trenches from the Swiss border to the sea, and it wouldn't move much for more than three years.

For Britain, the battle meant that the professional army of 1914 was gone. For Germany, it gave the Langemarck legend, which politicians, and later the Nazis, would use to teach schoolboys that a young man's best death was a charge into the guns.

Nearly 80,000 Germans and 54,000 British were lost around one small Belgian town, and Ypres held.

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In October 1914 the German army sent four brand-new reserve corps against a thin line of British, French and Belgian troops around the Belgian town of Ypres, and the Germans meant to be in the Channel ports within a week.

Seven weeks later the line was still there, and it was nearly all that was left of the old British army.

By October 1914 both sides had run out of room. After the Marne and the Aisne, each army had been trying to get around the other's northern end, and the "race to the sea" had pushed the whole front up into Belgium. The last gap was Flanders, a flat, wet country of hedges, ditches and small farms where it was hard to see anything coming.

The Germans had a new chief of staff, General Erich von Falkenhayn. He had moved a fresh army north and given it four new reserve corps, raised from volunteers since the war began. On 10 October he told the German Fourth Army to cross the Yser, push on regardless of losses, and cut off Dunkirk and Calais.

What stood in the way was an improvised line. The British Expeditionary Force had been shifted north in secret. The Belgians had come out of Antwerp with 80,000 men.

The French general Ferdinand Foch was trying to run all three armies, and he didn't have formal command over two of them. Foch wanted to attack. So did the British commander, Field Marshal Sir John French.

Neither of them had enough men to make it work.

On 21 October the fighting around the village of Langemarck began, and for four days the German reserve corps came on in dense formations, poorly trained and badly supported by their own guns. Losses in some units ran as high as 70 per cent, and the line held.

A German communiqué of 11 November called it a "Kindermord," a massacre of the innocents. The idea was that thousands of student volunteers had walked into British rifle fire singing "Deutschland über Alles." It became one of the most famous stories of the war in Germany.

The historians Jack Sheldon and Karl Unruh later took it apart. The corps did hold volunteers. But at most about 30 per cent of the men in the reserve corps sent to Flanders were volunteers.

Only about 30 per cent of German casualties at Ypres were young student reservists. Reserve Infantry Regiment 211 had 970 untrained volunteers, but also 1,499 older Landwehr men and nearly 300 former soldiers from the reserve. Singing was probably a way to find your own unit in the dark.

About 44,000 German dead are buried at Langemark today.

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When the reserve corps failed, Falkenhayn tried something heavier.

He built a new force out of regular troops under General Max von Fabeck, gave it 250 heavy guns and sent it up the Menin Road toward Ypres.

It struck on 29 October in thick fog. By nightfall it had taken the crossroads at Gheluvelt and 600 British prisoners, and it had come within about three kilometres of Ypres.

The crisis came on 31 October. That morning German attacks broke through near Gheluvelt, and at about 12:45 p.m. Major General Samuel Lomax, who commanded the British 1st Division, came to the château at Hooge, where both divisional staffs had gathered, and told General Monro, "My line is broken."

At about 1:15 p.m. German shells hit the château. Six staff officers were killed.

Lomax was badly wounded and died the next April, and Monro was stunned.

By then the one reserve the British had was already moving. Brigadier General Charles FitzClarence, who had a Victoria Cross from the siege of Mafeking, had ordered it forward. About 370 men of three companies of the 2nd Battalion, Worcestershire Regiment, came out of Polygon Wood at 1 p.m. under Major Edward Hankey.

They ran a mile across open fields in full view of the German guns. More than a hundred of them were hit before they reached the crest. The rest went on, crossed a stream and a narrow-gauge railway, and ran into the château grounds.

The Bavarians who were there had not expected an attack, and they fled.

In the grounds the Worcesters found a handful of men from the 1st South Wales Borderers, who had been holding out all day and were nearly surrounded. Neither party knew the other was there.

The regimental history says Hankey recognised their colonel, an old friend, and said, "My God, fancy meeting you here." The colonel answered, "Thank God you have come."

The Worcesters lost 187 of those 370 men. Sir John French wrote in his despatch that the recapture of Gheluvelt was "the most critical moment in the whole of this great battle." That night Haig pulled the line back to a reverse slope where German guns couldn't see it, and the Germans didn't notice until five the next morning.

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In October 1920, at a Shepherd Dog Club of America show, a three-year-old German Shepherd placed third in his class. A report in the magazine Dogdom called him "immense in body and hind leg formation." His name was Etzel von Oeringen, and he was new to America.

He'd been born in Germany on October 1, 1917, and trained in Berlin as a police dog. He served with the German Red Cross in the First World War. After the war his owner was broke and couldn't even feed him. He turned down bigger offers and sent the dog to a friend who ran a kennel in White Plains, New York, where Etzel was to be sold.

The film director Laurence Trimble saw him. Trimble had already guided Jean the Vitagraph Dog, America's first canine movie star, and he knew what he was looking at. He talked the screenwriter Jane Murfin into buying the dog. The publicity people at First National Pictures gave him a new name: Strongheart.

Trimble trained him and directed him in four rugged outdoor pictures that Murfin wrote: The Silent Call (1921), Brawn of the North (1922), The Love Master (1924) and White Fang (1925). Strongheart became the first major dog star of feature films, two years ahead of Rin Tin Tin.

Almost none of it survives. Nearly all his films are lost. A print of The Love Master turned up in France, and The Return of Boston Blackie, from 1927, survives on 16mm.

A Washington Post correspondent named J. Allen Boone looked after Strongheart for a long stretch while Murfin and Trimble were away. The two reportedly formed a deep bond, and in 1939 Boone published a book called Letters to Strongheart.

In 1929 Strongheart brushed against a hot studio light and was burned. He died on June 24 that year at Murfin's home. He was eleven.

In 1932 a packing company put his name and picture on a can of dog food. It was still being made more than ninety years later. And on February 8, 1960, he got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, at 1724 Vine Street.

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@SERobinsonJr

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@AJamesMcCarthy Did Gregory get it

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Advice from Poppy: Look delighted. Somebody will assume they promised you something.

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https://t.co/nwj3BOADKY

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@EchoesofWarYT Happy birthday to the Marines. Hard to picture a better voice for that proclamation than Chesty Puller, reading it in Korea.

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The trial opened on 19 March 1850 before Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.

It lasted twelve days.

Spectators were rotated through the courtroom in groups, and more than 60,000 people watched some of it. Reporters came from London, Paris and Berlin.

The defense said the remains might not be Parkman's at all. Witnesses admitted they couldn't have recognized the body.

Then Parkman's dentist, Dr. Nathan Cooley Keep, took the stand. He had made Parkman a set of false teeth in 1846.

He showed the jury how the jaw from the furnace fit exactly into the plaster mold he had made of Parkman's mouth. As he fit the loose teeth into his plates, he broke down in tears.

Littlefield testified for two days. The defense suggested he was after the reward. He came across as calm and believable.

In those days, many authorities held that a murder charge required the killing itself to be proved beyond the least doubt, usually by producing the body. Here there were only parts of one, and some teeth.

On 30 March Shaw gave the jury a three-hour charge. He told them the case rested on circumstantial evidence.

The killing had to be proved "beyond reasonable doubt," and so did Webster's guilt. Then he explained what that meant.

"It is not mere possible doubt," Shaw said. It was the doubt left when jurors had weighed all the evidence. To convict, they had to be able to say "they feel an abiding conviction, to a moral certainty, of the truth of the charge."

The jury came back that night. The verdict was guilty.

Webster's lawyers lost their appeal, and Governor George Briggs refused a pardon. In June, Webster confessed. He said Parkman had raged at him in the laboratory about the debt, and that he had grabbed a stick of wood and struck him once on the side of the head.

"He fell instantly upon the pavement," Webster wrote. "There was no second blow. He did not move."

He called it a killing in a moment of rage, not murder. The sentence stood. On 30 August 1850 John White Webster was hanged in Boston.

Parkman's widow was the first to give money to a fund for Webster's wife and daughters, who were left poor.

The trial was the first in the United States where dental evidence and scientific testimony were accepted in a murder case. It showed a jury that a dentist could identify a body from his own work.

Shaw's charge, known as "the Webster charge," became the standard instruction on reasonable doubt. His biographer wrote in 1918 that probably no charge in the country had been followed "so frequently and so closely."

In the end, a man was hanged because his victim's dentist knew his own handiwork.

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On a Friday afternoon in November 1849, a man from one of the richest families in Boston walked into Harvard Medical College to collect a debt and was never seen leaving.

A week later the college janitor dug through a brick wall under a professor's laboratory and found what was left of him. The case was proved with a set of false teeth and a judge's definition of reasonable doubt that courts went on following for generations.

Everybody in Boston knew George Parkman by sight. He was tall and lean, with a jutting chin and a top hat, and he walked the city every day collecting his rents. He was rich enough to own a horse, but he didn't keep one.

Oliver Wendell Holmes said of him, "he abstained while others indulged, he walked while others rode, he worked while others slept."

Parkman had trained as a doctor, but he made his living as a landlord and moneylender. One of the men who owed him money was John White Webster, a chemistry lecturer at Harvard Medical College.

Webster was a Harvard man and a Boston gentleman, and he lived beyond his means. His family had already given up a house he had built in Cambridge. He owed money to several friends, and his salary and lecture fees didn't cover what he spent.

Parkman held a claim on Webster's property, including his cabinet of minerals. Then he found out Webster had offered the same property to someone else to cover another loan. Parkman began hounding him for the money in public.

On 22 November Parkman went to Cambridge and asked the Harvard cashier to hand over the money from Webster's lecture tickets. On the 23rd, Webster called at Parkman's house and suggested they meet at the college that afternoon at half past one.

At about 1:45 p.m. on Friday, 23 November, Parkman was seen going into the college on North Grove Street, in a dark frock coat and a purple satin vest. It was the last confirmed sighting of him alive.

That evening, Webster went to a party at a friend's house. He seemed perfectly calm.

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The Parkman family went to the police the next day.

They offered a reward of $3,000 for finding him alive and printed 28,000 notices. Later they offered $1,000 for his body.

The city had about 120 newspapers and magazines, and the talk was everywhere. At first people blamed Irish immigrants.

City Marshal Francis Tukey had the Charles River and Boston Harbor dragged. Officers searched Parkman's buildings and the medical college, including the dissecting vaults, and found nothing.

On Sunday, Webster called on Parkman's brother, the Reverend Francis Parkman. He said he had met George on Friday and paid him $483.64 toward the debt.

Then he left. He never asked how the search was going.

Ephraim Littlefield was the college janitor. He and his wife lived in the basement, next door to Webster's laboratory.

He started to watch the professor. A few days before Parkman vanished, Webster had asked him a lot of questions about the dissecting vault. Now Webster kept his rooms bolted.

He gave Littlefield a turkey for Thanksgiving, which he had never done before. One day the laboratory furnace burned so hot that the wall on the other side was too hot to touch.

On Thanksgiving Day, with his wife keeping watch, Littlefield borrowed a hatchet, a drill, a crowbar and a chisel. He went down a tunnel under the building and started on the brick wall below Webster's private privy.

On Friday, 30 November, he broke through. By the light of his lantern he saw a human pelvis and parts of a leg.

Littlefield ran for one of the professors, who fetched the marshal. Officers went to Webster's house in Cambridge and took him to jail on a charge of murder.

When he heard what the janitor had found, Webster said, "That villain! I am a ruined man."

In his cell he swallowed strychnine. It only made him ill.

Over the next days the searchers found more remains in a tea chest in the laboratory, and in the furnace they found bone fragments and part of a jaw with false teeth.

Boston's upper class couldn't believe it. "Of course, we cannot believe Dr. Webster guilty, bad as the evidence looks," Fanny Longfellow, the poet's wife, wrote. "Many suspect the janitor."

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Hays himself was caught.

In his report, Early wrote that Hays owed his escape to his horse. After Hays was surrounded and taken, the horse bolted.

The Union men started shooting at him, and Hays decided he might as well try for the bridge, since he'd be under fire either way. He made it across. Godwin didn't.

He was captured.

It was over fast. Early lost 1,670 men killed, wounded or captured, more than eighty percent of those engaged, and all four of Green's guns. Most of them were prisoners.

The Union lost 419. Of those, 139 were from the 6th Maine, the heaviest loss of any Union regiment that day.

Hays claimed he'd been attacked by 20,000 to 25,000 men. That was about ten times the real number. Two of the Confederacy's best brigades, behind earthworks and backed by artillery, had been routed and captured by an enemy force of about the same size.

Major General Horatio G. Wright noted that it was the first time Union troops had carried a strongly entrenched Confederate position in the first assault. Walter Taylor of Lee's staff called it "the saddest chapter in the history of this army," the result of "miserable, miserable management."

An enlisted man put it more simply. "I don't know much about it," he said, "but it seems to be that our army was surprised."

Lee had no time that night to find out what had gone wrong. With the bridgehead gone, his plan to attack French was finished and his army was stretched out along a line it could no longer hold.

A quick enemy might pin him against the Rapidan River, the way he had tried to pin John Pope against the Rappahannock a year before. Lee called off the attack, and within hours his army was marching south.

He set up a new line behind the Rapidan. Later that month Meade moved against him again, and after a standoff that ended in early December, the armies went into winter quarters.

Upton was cited for gallant service at Rappahannock Station. Six months later, at Spotsylvania, he led twelve regiments in a column straight at the Confederate works at the Mule Shoe. The idea was to hit a small part of the line hard and fast without stopping to trade fire, and it would foreshadow the trench assaults of the First World War.

Hays lost a third of his remaining men in the Wilderness in May 1864, and he was badly wounded at Spotsylvania five days later. Godwin was exchanged in 1864 and given command of his old brigade. Russell was killed by a shell fragment at the Third Battle of Winchester in September 1864.

Sergeant Otis O. Roberts of the 6th Maine received the Medal of Honor for his part in the attack.

The village of Rappahannock Station is called Remington now. The American Battlefield Trust and its partners have saved land at the bridgehead and on both sides of the old railroad.

Nearly 2,000 men held the one bridge across the river, and in half an hour of darkness it was gone.

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On 7 November 1863, Robert E. Lee kept one bridge open across the Rappahannock River and nearly 2,000 men on the far bank to guard it.

All afternoon the Union guns shelled them, and Lee decided it was a feint. It wasn't. At dusk the guns went quiet and the Union infantry came over the walls, and in about half an hour two of Lee's best brigades were gone.

After Gettysburg, the two armies drifted back into Virginia. For three months they sparred on the rolling plains of the northern part of the state, and not much came of it.

In October Lee went on the offensive, trying to get around the Union right, and the Army of the Potomac fell back toward Centreville. On 14 October, at Bristoe Station, Lee's men attacked without proper reconnaissance and two of their brigades were mauled behind a railroad embankment.

Lee had outrun his supplies. He pulled back to the Rappahannock River, tearing up the Orange and Alexandria Railroad as he went, and in late October he settled in behind the river. He hoped to hold that line all winter.

The Union commander, Major General George G. Meade, was under pressure from Washington to go after him. It took him a while. By the first week of November he was ready.

Lee kept one link with the north bank. At Rappahannock Station, where the railroad bridge had once crossed the river, there was a single pontoon bridge.

On the north side, guarding it, the Confederates had built a bridgehead: two redoubts on the high ground, joined by trenches. Batteries on the hills south of the river covered it.

Lee knew what he wanted from it. Holding the bridgehead, he later explained, let him "threaten any flank movement the enemy might make above or below, and thus compel him to divide his forces." If Meade split his army to cross, Lee could gather his own and strike one half.

Meade did split his army. He sent Major General William H. French to force a crossing at Kelly's Ford, five miles downstream.

Major General John Sedgwick, with the Sixth Corps, would go straight at the bridgehead. Once both were over, the army would join up again and march on Brandy Station.

The bridgehead belonged to Major General Jubal Early's division that day. Few officers in Lee's army had a bigger reputation for fighting. Early put Brigadier General Harry T. Hays's Louisiana brigade into the works, with Captain Charles A. Green's four guns of the Louisiana Guard Artillery.

Hays's men were known as the Louisiana Tigers. His four regiments had fought in nearly every big battle in the East, from First Manassas to Gettysburg. Hays himself had led them up Cemetery Hill at Gettysburg in the twilight of 2 July and held Union guns there for a while, until no support came and he had to pull back.

Shortly after noon on 7 November, French drove the Confederate defenders away from Kelly's Ford and began crossing. At about the same time Sedgwick came on toward Rappahannock Station.

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Lee heard about both moves sometime after noon and put his army in motion.

His plan was to hold off Sedgwick at the bridgehead with a small force and hit French with the rest. It all depended on the bridgehead holding until French was beaten.

At 3 p.m. Major General Albion P. Howe's division drove in the Confederate skirmishers and took a stretch of high ground about three-quarters of a mile from the river.

Howe put batteries up there and opened what was called a "rapid and vigorous" fire on the earthworks. The Confederate guns across the river answered, without much effect.

At 4:30 Early sent three North Carolina regiments into the works under Colonel Archibald Godwin. They had been Robert Hoke's brigade, and Godwin had led them since Gettysburg. That brought the defenders to nearly 2,000.

Sedgwick kept shelling through the late afternoon, but his infantry didn't move. As the light went, Lee became convinced the whole business was a feint to cover French's crossing downstream.

He was wrong.

The sun went down behind the Blue Ridge at about five. The shelling stopped. Then the Union infantry rushed the works.

Brigadier General David A. Russell's division led. On the left, next to the railroad, Colonel Peter Ellmaker's brigade went for the redoubts, with skirmishers of the 6th Maine out in front and the 5th Wisconsin close behind. The Maine regiment formed a double skirmish line and went forward at the command "Forward, double-quick!"

The regiment's commander, Major George Fuller, said the Confederate musketry "grew heavier as the line neared the works, and the men were struck with fearful rapidity." They went over the walls anyway. Inside it was hand-to-hand, men fighting with rammers and rifle butts.

Without help, the 6th Maine broke the line and planted its flags on the parapet of the eastern redoubt. A few moments later the 5th Wisconsin swarmed over the walls of the western one.

On the right, minutes after Ellmaker's men got in, Colonel Emory Upton's brigade overran Godwin's position. Upton re-formed his men inside the Confederate works.

He sent part of the 121st New York, under Major Andrew Mather, to seize the pontoon bridge. The rest of the brigade wheeled right toward the Confederates now crowded together at the lower end of the bridgehead.

Mather had a surprise waiting for him. The 49th Pennsylvania had followed the first wave over the works and pushed on behind the Confederates. A corporal named Henry B. Minnichan saw the bridge and rushed it with 18 men.

When Mather arrived, he asked who was in command.

"Here I am," said Minnichan.

"You!"

"Yes sir, me and the bridge is safe."

The bridge was the only way out. Hundreds of Confederates threw down their arms and surrendered.

Others tried to swim or ford the icy river, or ran for the bridge under Union rifle fire. On the south bank, their comrades could only watch as the Union soldiers marched the prisoners to the rear.