The First Parallel

A wide, flat reach of sand and marsh grass, a track worn through the middle distance, and along the horizon the low line of the works — the First Parallel, the opening trench of the siege, photographed by Haas & Peale in the weeks it was already being left behind.

The parallels tell the siege's whole story in numbers: the first dug after the 10 July landing, the second holding seven heavy gun platforms by the first of August, the third changing the sharpshooters' arithmetic by mid-month, the full sap creeping beyond it at two in the morning on the 19th. This unpromising stretch of sand is where that ladder started.