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Lee and Grant had fought each other over seven hundred square miles of territory since June 9, 1864; more than seventy thousand soldiers had died in nineteen separate battles. Now, the struggle had narrowed to the possession of the Five Forks crossroads, fifteen miles from Petersburg. Lee needed to hold it just long enough for his forces to escape from Petersburg using the Southside Railroad. Tom Conolly was again at Lee’s headquarters, where he watched the general outline the battle plan to his staff, using a stick and a “mud map.” Conolly remained with Lee rather than following Generals Fitz Lee and George Pickett to Five Forks, and he was rewarded with the spectacle of a skirmish between two picket lines:

This pleased [Conolly] so much, [wrote General Wilcox] that he offered his service to me for the coming campaign, and said if I would permit him he would remain with me until its close. I accepted his tender of service, and told him I would make him one of my volunteer aides. He thanked me, and asked if I would let him go under fire. I replied that it would hardly be possible for him to escape being under fire. He said he would return to Richmond, get his baggage and report to me early Monday morning [April 3].19

At Five Forks, Fitz Lee and Pickett had orders to hold the crossroads “at all hazard.” Welly had been placed on Fitz Lee’s staff, where he was delighted to discover another British volunteer, Francis Dawson. They rose at 3:30 A.M. on March 31, and “after a rough breakfast we all went down to General Pickett’s headquarters where a Council of War took place. We remained here for 3 hours or so, smoking and telling stories in a downfall of rain the whole time.”20 Years afterward, Dawson also remembered the terrible rain that had chilled him to the bone. He had tried to keep warm by gulping coffee out of an old tin cup before the fighting commenced, scalding his lips in the process. Later in the morning another moment seared itself in his memory. “It was very difficult to rally the men,” he wrote:

One fellow whom I halted as he was running to the rear, and whom I threatened to shoot if he did not stop, looked up in my face in the most astonished manner, and, raising his carbine at an angle of forty-five degrees, fired it in the air, or at the tops of the pines, and resumed his flight. It made me laugh, angry as I was.21

Toward sundown, General Fitz Lee’s men made a final, desperate charge against Sheridan’s line. One bullet struck an overhanging branch just as Dawson lowered his head to ride under the tree; the next tore into his shoulder.

“Bad news from Pickett,” recorded Welly on April 1. “He has lost 5,000 men out of 8,000, and the remainder are cut off from us.” The two generals, Fitz Lee and Pickett, had ridden off to a picnic, having assumed that Sheridan would spend the day entrenching his men. Far from it: Sheridan launched a surprise attack. “We had no idea that the enemy were so close to us,” wrote Welly, “when all of a sudden about 250 Yankees let drive at us, it was so sudden that nobody could help being startled. I looked round and the whole regiment had disappeared.” Sheridan captured more than four thousand prisoners at Five Forks. As the scattered Confederates found one another, Welly was relieved to learn that “Dawson, one of my brother ADCs,” had not been killed, but sent to Richmond at Fitz Lee’s insistence.22

Dawson arrived in the city so befuddled with morphine that he was oblivious to the turmoil in the streets. At dawn on Sunday, April 2, Grant ordered an all-out attack on Lee’s defenses, smashing through at almost every point. Lee realized he had to retreat immediately or risk being surrounded and captured. He ordered the troops to evacuate and sent a telegram to Davis advising him to leave Richmond. The message was delivered to Davis while he was at church. Conolly was sitting in a pew nearby and observed the sexton whisper in his ear. “He rises and leaves