After 30 plus years, I have been slowly re-reading Shelby Foote's 3 volume doorstop on the Civil War.
With more interest going to Gettysburg and almost any other battles-one almost forgets about the bloody first 5 weeks (May/June 1864) when Grant and Lee first faced each other.
In many ways, the Army of the Potomac was almost wrecked in that time period.
Grant lost a third of his infantry in about the first week at the Wilderness and Spotsylvania. If I had to pick one Civil War battle not to be randomly assigned to it on either side it would be Spotsylvania.
Obviously, Lee lost troops also, but not at the same ratio-the only thing that kept Grant going is that he was able to replace his casualties much easier than Lee was.
But after the extremely bloody 8 minute (!!!!) Union assault at Cold Harbor-even he started to run out of replacements.
I had completely forgotten that at the North Anna River (between Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor) Lee almost trapped Grant and, may have only failed to do so because he was severely under the weather right then and he was starting to run out of aggressive commanders by that time in the war.
After the quick and bloody repulse at Cold Harbor-Grant ordered more assaults for a few hours-but the lower level officers basically just had the men shoot blindly while lying down to Kinda/Sorta comply with the order.