GETTYSBURG
The sun of the first day of July rose serene into an azure sky where a
few white clouds were floating. The light summer mist was dissipated;
a morning wind, freshly sweet, rippled the corn and murmured in the
green and lusty trees. The sunshine gilded Little Round Top and Big
Round Top, gilded Culp’s Hill and Cemetery Hill, gilded Oak Hill and
Seminary Ridge. It flashed from the cupola of the Pennsylvania
College. McPherson’s Woods caught it on its topmost branches, and the
trees of Peach Orchard. It trembled between the leaves, and flecked
with golden petals Menchey’s Spring and Spangler’s Spring. It lay in
sleepy lengths on the Emmitsburg road. It struck the boulders of the
Devil’s Den; it made indescribably light and fine the shocked wheat in
a wheat-field that drove into the green like a triangular golden
wedge. Full in the centre of the rich landscape it made a shining
mark, a golden bull’s-eye, of the small town of Gettysburg.
It should have been all peace, that rich Pennsylvania landscape—a
Dutch peace—a Quaker peace. Market wains and country folk should have
moved upon the roads, and a boy, squirrel-hunting, should have been
the most murderous thing in the Devil’s Den. Corn-blades should have
glistened, not bayonets; for the fluttering flags the farmers’ wives
should have been bleaching linen on the grass; for marching feet there
should have risen the sound of the scythe in the wheat; for the groan
of gun wheels upon the roads the robin’s song and the bobwhite’s call.
The sun mounted. He was well above the tree-tops when the first shot
was fired—Heth’s brigade of A.P. Hill’s corps encountering Buford’s
cavalry.
The sun went down the first day red behind the hills. He visited the
islands of the Pacific, Nippon, and the Kingdom of Flowers, and India
and Iran. He crowned Caucasus with gold, and showered largess over
Europe. He reddened the waves of the Atlantic. He touched with his
spear lighthouses and coast towns and the inland green land. He came
up over torn orchard and trampled wheatfield; he came up over the
Round Tops and Culp’s Hill and Cemetery Hill. But no one, this second
day, stopped to watch his rising. The battle smoke hid him from the
living upon the slopes and in all the fields.
The sun travelled from east to west, but no man on the shield of which
Gettysburg was the centre saw him go down that second day. A thick
smoke, like the wings of countless ravens, kept out the parting
gleams. He went his way over the plains of the West and the Pacific
and the Asian lands. He came over Europe and the Atlantic and made, on
the third morning, bright pearl of the lighthouses, the surf, and the
shore. The ripe July country welcomed him. But around Gettysburg his
rising was not seen. The smoke had not dispersed. He rode on high, but
all that third day he was seen far away and dim as through crêpe. All
day he shone serene on other lands, but above this region he hung
small and dim and remote like a tarnished, antique shield. Sometimes
the drift of ravens’ wings hid him quite. But an incense mounted to
him, a dark smell and a dark vapour.
The birds were gone from the trees, the cattle from the fields, the
children from the lanes and the brookside. All left on the first day.
There was a hollow between Round Top and Devil’s Den, and into this
the anxious farmers had driven and penned a herd of cattle. On the
sunny, calm afternoon when they had done this, they could not conceive
that any battle would affect this hollow. Here the oxen, the cows,
would be safe from chance bullet and from forager. But the farmers did
not guess the might of that battle.
The stream of shells was directed against Round Top, but a number,
black and heavy, rained into the hollow. A great, milk-white ox was
the first wounded. He lay with his side ripped open, a ghastly sight.
Then a cow with calf was mangled, then a young steer had both fore
legs broken. Bellowing, the maddened herd rushed here and there,
attacking the rough sides of the hollow. Death and panic were upon the
slopes as well as at the bottom of the basin. A bursting shell killed
and wounded a dozen at once. The air grew thick and black, and filled
with the cry of the cattle.
A courier, returning to his general after delivering an order, had his
horse shot beneath him. Disentangling himself, he went on, on foot,
through a wood. He was intolerably thirsty—and lo, a spring! It was
small and round and clear like a mirror, and as he knelt he saw his
own face and thought, “She wouldn’t know me.” The minies were so
continuously singing that he had ceased to heed them. He drank, then
saw that he was reddening the water. He did not know when he had been
wounded, but now, as he tried to rise, he grew so faint and cold that
he knew that Death had met him.... There was moss and fern and a
nodding white flower. It wasn’t a bad place in which to die. In a
pocket within his grey jacket he had a daguerreotype—a young and
smiling face and form. His fingers were so nerveless now that it was
hard to get the little velvet case out, and when it was out it proved
to be shattered, it and the picture within. The smiling face and form
were all marred, unrecognizable. So small a thing, perhaps!—but it
made the bitterness of this soldier’s death. The splintered case in
his hands, he died as goes to sleep a child who has been unjustly
punished. His body sank deep among the fern, his chest heaved, he
shook his head faintly, and then it dropped upon the moss, between the
stems of the nodding white flower.
A long Confederate line left a hillside and crossed an open space of
corn-field and orchard. Double-quick it moved, under its banners,
under the shells shrieking above. The guns changed range, and an iron
flail struck the line. It wavered, wavered. A Federal line leaped a
stone wall, and swept forward, under its banners, hurrahing. Midway of
the wide open there was stretched beneath the murky sky a narrow
web—woof of grey, warp of blue. The strip held while the heart beat a
minute or more, then it parted. The blue edge went backward over the
plain; the grey edge, after a moment, rushed after. “_Yaaaiihhh!
Yaaaiiihhhh!_” it shouted,—and its red war-flag glowed like fire. The
grey commander-in-chief watched from a hillside, a steady light in his
eyes. Over against him on another hill, Meade, the blue general,
likewise watched. To the south, across the distant Potomac, lay the
vast, beleaguered, Southern fortress. Its gate had opened; out had
poured a vast sally party, a third of its bravest and best, and at the
head the leader most trusted, most idolized. Out had rushed the Army
of Northern Virginia. It had crossed the moat of the Potomac; it was
here, on the beleaguer’s ground.
Earth and heaven were shaking with the clangour of two shields. The
sky was whirring and dim, but there might be imagined, suspended
there, a huge balance—here the besiegers, here the fortress’s best and
bravest. Which would this day, or these days, tip the beam? Much hung
upon that—all might be said to hang upon that. The waves on the plain
rolled forward, rolled back, rolled forward. When the sun went down
the first day the fortress’s battle-flag was in the ascendant.
A great red barn was the headquarters of “Dear Dick Ewell.” He rode
with Gordon and others at a gallop down a smoky road between stone
fences. “Wish Old Jackson was here!” he said. “Wish Marse Robert had
Old Jackson! This is the watershed, General Gordon—yes, sir! this is
the watershed of the war! If it doesn’t still go right to-day—It seems
to me that wall there’s got a suspicious look—”
The wall in question promptly justified the suspicion. There came from
behind it a volley that emptied grey saddles.
Gordon heard the thud of the minie as it struck “Old Dick.” “Are you
hurt, sir? Are you hurt?”
“No, no, General! I’m not hurt. But if that ball had struck you, sir,
we’d have had the trouble of carrying you off the field. I’m a whole
lot better fixed than you for a fight! It don’t hurt a mite to be shot
in a wooden leg.”
Three grey soldiers lay behind a shock of wheat. They were young men,
old schoolmates. This wheat-shock marked the farthest point attained
in a desperate charge made by their regiment against a larger force.
It was one of those charges in which everybody sees that if a miracle
happens it will be all right, and that if it doesn’t happen—It was one
of those charges in which first an officer stands out, waving his
sword, then a man or two follow him, then three or four more, then all
waver back, only to start forth again, then others join, then the
officer cries aloud, then, with a roar, the line springs forward and
rushes over the field, in the cannon’s mouth. Such had been the
procedure in this charge. The miracle had not happened. After a period
of mere din as of ocean waves the three found themselves behind this
heap of tarnished gold. When, gasping, they looked round, all their
fellows had gone back; they saw them a distant torn line, still
holding the flag. Then a rack of smoke came between, hiding flag and
all. The three seemed alone in the world. The wheat-ears made a low
inner sound like reeds in quiet marshes. The smoke lifted just enough
to let a muddy sunlight touch an acre of the dead.
“We’ve got,” said one of the young men, “to get out of here. They’ll
be countercharging in a minute.”
“O God! let them charge.”
“Harry, are you afraid—”
“Yes; I’m afraid—sick and afraid. O God, O God!”
The oldest of the three, moving his head very cautiously, looked round
the wheat-shock. “The Army of the Potomac’s coming.” He rose to his
knees, facing the other way. “It’s two hundred yards to the regiment.
Well, we always won the races at the old Academy. I’ll start, Tom, and
then you follow, and then you, Harry, you come straight along!”
He rose to his feet, took the posture of a runner, drew a deep breath
and started. Two yards from the shock a cannon ball sheared the head
from the body. The body fell, jutting blood. The head bounded back
within the shadow of the wheat-shock. Tom was already standing, bent
like a bow. A curious sound came from his lips, he glanced aside, then
ran. He ran as swiftly as an Indian, swiftly and well. The minie did
not find him until he was halfway across the field. Then it did, and
he threw up his arms and fell. Harry, on his hands and knees, turned
from side to side an old, old face, bloodless and twisted. He heard
the Army of the Potomac coming, and in front lay the corpses. He tried
to get to his feet, but his joints were water, and there was a crowd
of black atoms before his eyes. A sickness, a clamminess, a
despair—and all in eternities.... Then the sound swelled, and it drove
him as the cry of the hounds drives the hare. He ran, panting, but the
charge now swallowed up the wheat-shock and came thundering on. In
front was only the dead, piled at the foot of the wall of smoke. He
still clutched his gun, and now with a shrill cry, he stopped, turned,
and stood at bay. He had hurt a hunter in the leg, before the blue
muskets clubbed him down.
A regiment, after advancing a skirmish line, moved over broken and
boulder-strewn ground to occupy a yet defended position. In front
moved the colonel, half turned toward his men, encouraging them in a
rich and hearty voice. “Come on, men! Come on! Come on! You are all
good harvesters, and the grain is ripe, the grain is ripe! Come on,
every mother’s son of you! Run, now! just as though there were home
and children up there! Come on! Come on!”
The regiment reached a line of flat boulders. There was a large, flat
one like an altar slab, that the colonel must spring upon and cross.
Upon it, outstretched, face upward, in a pool of blood, lay a young
figure, a lieutenant of skirmishers, killed a quarter of an hour ago.
“Come on! Come on!” shouted the colonel, his face turned to his men.
“Victory! To-night we’ll write home about the victory!”
His foot felt for the top edge of the boulder. He sprang upon it, and
faced with suddenness the young dead. The oncoming line saw him stand
as if frozen, then with a stiff jerk up went the sword again. “Come
on! Come on!” he cried, and plunging from the boulder continued to
mount the desired slope. His men, close behind him, also encountered
the dead on the altar slab. “Good God! It’s Lieutenant —— It’s his
son!” But in front the colonel’s changed voice continued its crying,
“Come on! Come on! Come on!”
A stone wall, held by the grey, leaped fire, rattled and smoked. It
did this at short intervals for a long while, a brigade of the enemy
choosing to charge at like intervals. The grey’s question was a
question of ammunition. So long as the ammunition held out, so would
they and the wall. They sent out foragers for cartridges. Four men,
having secured a quantity from an impatiently sympathetic reserve,
heaped them in a blanket, made a large bundle, and slung it midway of
a musket. One man took the butt, another the muzzle, and as they had
to reckon with sharpshooters going back, the remaining two marched in
front. All double-quicked where the exposure was not extreme, and ran
where it was. The echoing goal grew larger—as did also a clump of elms
at right angles with the wall. Vanguard cocked its eye. “Buzzards in
those trees, boys—blue buzzards!”
Vanguard pitched forward as he spoke. The three ran on. Ten yards, and
the man who had been second and was now first, was picked off. The two
ran on, the cartridges between them. “We’re goners!” said the one, and
the other nodded as he ran.
There was a grey battery somewhere in the smoke, and now by chance or
intention it flung into the air a shell that shrieked its way straight
to the clump of elms, and exploded in the round of leaf and branch.
The sharpshooters were stilled. “Moses and the prophets!” said the
runners. “That’s a last year’s bird’s nest!”
Altogether the foragers brought in ammunition enough to serve the grey
wall’s immediate purpose. It cracked and flamed for another while, and
then the blue brigade ceased its charges and went elsewhere. It went
thinned—oh, thinned!—in numbers. The grey waited a little for the
smoke to lift, and then it mounted the wall. “And the ground before
us,” says a survivor, “was the most heavenly blue!”
A battalion of artillery, thundering across a corner of the field,
went into position upon a little hilltop. Facing it was Cemetery Hill
and a tall and wide-arched gateway. This gateway, now clearly seen,
now withdrawn behind a world of grey smoke, now showing a half arch,
an angle, a span of the crest, exercised a fascination. The gunners,
waiting for the word, watched it. “Gate of Death, don’t it look?—Gate
of Death.”—“Wonder what’s beyond?”—“Yankees.”—“But they ain’t
dead—they’re alive and kicking!”—“Now it’s hidden—Gate of
Death.”—“This battle’s going to lay over Sharpsburg. Over Gaines’s
Mill—over Malvern Hill—over Fredericksburg—over Second Manassas—over—”
“The Gate’s hidden—there’s a battery over there going to open—” “One?
there’s two, there’s three—” “_Cannoneers, to your pieces!_”
A shell dug into the earth and exploded. There was a heavy rain of
dark earth. It pattered against all the pieces. It showered men and
horses, and for a minute made a thick twilight of the air. “Whew! the
Earth’s taking a hand! Anybody hurt?”—“_Howitzer, load!_”
“Gate of Death’s clear.”
An artillery lieutenant,—Robert Stiles,—acting as volunteer aide to
Gordon, was to make his way across the battle-field with information
for Edward Johnson. The ground was strewn with the dead, the air was a
shrieking torrent of shot and shell. The aide and his horse thought
only of the thing in hand—getting across that field, getting across
with the order. The aide bent to the horse’s neck; the horse laid
himself to the ground and raced like a wild horse before a prairie
fire. The aide thought of nothing; he was going to get the order
there; for the rest his mind seemed as useless as a mirror with a
curtain before it. Afterwards, however, when he had time to look he
found in the mirror pictures enough. Among them was a picture of a
battalion—Latimer’s battalion. “Never, before or after, did I see
fifteen or twenty guns in such a condition of wreck and destruction as
this battalion was! It had been hurled backward, as it were by the
very weight and impact of metal, from the position it had occupied on
the crest of a little ridge, into a saucer-shaped depression behind
it; and such a scene as it presented!—guns dismounted and disabled,
carriages splintered and crushed, ammunition chests exploded, limbers
upset, wounded horses plunging and kicking, dashing out the brains of
men tangled in the harness; while cannoneers with pistols were
crawling round through the wreck shooting the struggling horses to
save the lives of the wounded men.”
Hood and his Texans and Law’s Alabamians were trying to take Little
Round Top. They drove out the line of sharpshooters behind the stone
wall girdling the height. Back went the blue, up the steeps, up to
their second line, behind a long ledge of rock. Up and after went the
grey. The tall boulders split the advance like the teeth of a comb; no
alignment could be kept. The rocks formed defiles where only two or
three could go abreast. The way was steep and horrible, and from above
rained the bullets. Up went the grey, reinforced now by troops from
McLaws’s division; up they went and took the second line. Back and up
went the blue to the bald and rocky crest, to their third line, a
stronghold, indeed, and strongly held. Up and on came the grey, but it
was as though the sky were raining lead. The grey fell like leaves in
November when the winds howl around Round Top. Oh, the boulders! The
blood on the boulders, making them slippery! Oh, the torn limbs of
trees, falling so fast! The eyes smarted in the smoke; the voice
choked in the throat. All men were hoarse with shouting.
Darkness and light went in flashes, but the battle odour stayed,
and the unutterable volume of sound. All the dogs of war were
baying. The muscles strained, the foot mounted. Forward and up
went the battle-flag, red ground and blue cross. Now the boulders
were foes, and now they were shields. Men knelt behind them and
fired upward. Officers laid aside their swords, took the muskets
from the dead, knelt and fired. But the crest of Round Top darted
lightnings—lightnings and bolts of leaden death. Death rained from
Round Top, and the drops beat down the grey. Hood was badly hurt
in the arm. Pender fell mortally wounded. Anderson was wounded.
Semmes fell mortally wounded. Barksdale received here his
death-wound. Amid the howl of the storm, in the leaden air, in
scorching, in blood and pain and tumult and shouting, the small,
unheeded disk of the sun touched the western rim of the earth.
A wounded man lay all night in Devil’s Den. There were other wounded
there, but the great boulders hid them from one another. This man lay
in a rocky angle, upon the overhanging lip of the place. Below him,
smoke clung like a cerement to the far-flung earth. For a time smoke
was about him, thick in his nostrils. For a time it hid the sky. But
now all firing was stayed, the night was wheeling on, and the smoke
lifted. Below, vague in the night-time, were seen flickering
lights—torches, he knew, ambulances, litter-bearers, lifting, serving
one in a hundred. They were far away, scattered over the stricken
field. They would not come up here to Devil’s Den. He knew they would
not come, and he watched them as the shipwrecked watch the sail upon
the horizon that has not seen their signal, and that will not see it.
He, shipwrecked here, had waved no cloth, but, idle as it was, he had
tried to shout. His voice had fallen like a broken-winged bird. Now he
lay, in a pool of his own blood, not greatly in pain, but dying.
Presently he grew light-headed, though not so much so but that he knew
that he was light-headed, and could from time to time reason with his
condition. He was a reading man, and something of a thinker, and now
his mind in its wanderings struck into all manner of by-paths.
For a time he thought that the field below was the field of Waterloo.
He remembered seeing, while it was yet light, a farmhouse, a distant
cluster of buildings with a frightened air. “La Belle Alliance,” he
thought, “or Hougomont—which?—These Belgians planted a lot of wheat,
and now there are red poppies all through it.—Where is Ney and his
cavalry?—No, Stuart and his cavalry—” His mind righted for a moment.
“This is a long battle, and a long night. Come, Death! Come, Death!”
The shadowy line of boulders became a line of Deaths, tall, draped
figures bearing scythes. Three Deaths, then a giant hour-glass, then
three Deaths, then the hour-glass. He stared, fascinated. “Which
scythe? The one that starts out of line—now if I can keep them still
in line—just so long will I live!” He stared for a while, till the
Deaths became boulders again and his fingers fell to playing with the
thickening blood on the ground beside him. A meteor pierced the
night—a white fire-ball thrown from the ramparts of the sky. He seemed
to be rushing with it, rushing, rushing, rushing,—a rushing river.
There was a heavy sound. As his head sank back he saw again the line
of Deaths, and the one that left the line.
Below, through the night, the wind that blew over the wheat-fields and
the meadows, the orchards and the woods, was a moaning wind. It was a
wind with a human voice.
Dawn came, but the guns smeared her translucence with black. The sun
rose, but the ravens’ wings hid him. Dull red and sickly copper was
this day, hidden and smothered by dark wreaths. Many things happened
in it, variation and change that cast a tendril toward the future.
Day drove on; sultry and loud and smoky. A squad of soldiers in a
fence corner, waiting for the order forward, exchanged opinions.
“Three days. We’re going to fight forever—and ever—and ever.”—“You may
be. I ain’t. I’m going to fight through to where there’s peace—”
“‘Peace!’ How do you spell it?”—“‘They cry Peace! Peace! and there is
no Peace!’”—“D’ye reckon if one of us took a bucket and went over to
that spring there, he’d be shot?”—“Of course he would! Besides,
where’s the bucket?”—“I’ve got a canteen.”—“I’ve got a cup—” “Say,
Sergeant, can we go?”—“No. You’ll be killed.”—“I’d just as soon be
killed as to perish of thirst! Besides, a shell’ll come plumping down
directly and kill us anyhow.”—“Talk of something pleasant.”—“Jim’s
caught a grasshopper! Poor little hoppergrass, you oughtn’t to be out
here in this wide and wicked world! Let him go, Jim.”—“How many killed
and wounded do you reckon there are?”—“Thirty thousand of us, and
sixty thousand of them.”—“I wish that smoke would lift so’s we could
see something!“—”_Look out! Look out! Get out of this!_”
Two men crawled away from the crater made by the shell. A heavy
tussock of grass in their path stopped them. One rose to his knees,
the other, who was wounded, took the posture of the dying Gaul in the
Capitoline. “Who are you?” said the one.—“I am Jim Dudley. Who are
you?”—“I—I didn’t know you, Jim. I’m Randolph.—Well, we’re all that’s
left.”
The dead horses lay upon this field one and two and three days in the
furnace heat. They were fearful to see and there came from them a
fetid odour. But the scream of the wounded horses was worse than the
sight of the dead. There were many wounded horses. They lay in wood
and field, in country lane and orchard. No man tended them, and they
knew not what it was all about. To and fro and from side to side of
the vast, cloud-wreathed Mars’s Shield galloped the riderless horses.
At one of the clock all the guns, blue and grey, opened in a cannonade
that shook the leaves of distant trees. A smoke as of Vesuvius or
Ætna, sulphurous, pungent, clothed the region of battle. The air
reverberated and the hills trembled. The roar was like the roar of the
greatest cataract of a larger world, like the voice of a storm sent by
the King of all the Genii. Amid its deep utterance the shout even of
many men could not be heard.
Out from the ranks of the fortress’s defenders rushed a grey,
world-famous charge. It was a division charging—three brigades _en
échelon_,—five thousand men, led by a man with long auburn locks. Down
a hill, across a rolling open, up an opposite slope,—half a mile in
all, perhaps,—lay their road. Mars and Bellona may be figured in the
air above it. It was a spectacle, that charge, fit to draw the fierce
eyes and warm the gloomy souls of all the warrior deities. Woden may
have watched and the Aztec god. The blue artillery crowned that
opposite slope, and other slopes. The blue artillery swung every
muzzle; it spat death upon the five thousand. The five thousand went
steadily, grey and cool and clear, the vivid flag above them. A light
was on their bayonets—the three lines of bayonets—the three brigades,
Garnett and Kemper and Armistead. A light was in the eyes of the men;
they saw the fortress above the battle clouds; they saw their homes,
and the watchers upon the ramparts. They went steadily, to the eyes of
history in a curious, unearthly light, the light of a turn in human
affairs, the light of catastrophe, the light of an ending and a
beginning.
When they came into the open between the two heights, the massed blue
infantry turned every rifle against them. There poured a leaden rain
of death. Here, too, the three lines met an enfilading fire from the
batteries on Round Top. Death howled and threw himself against the
five thousand; in the air above might be heard the Valkyries calling.
There were not now five thousand, there were not now four thousand.
There was a clump of trees seen like spectres through the smoke. It
rose from the slope which was the grey goal, from the slope peopled by
Federal batteries, with a great Federal infantry support at hand.
Toward this slope, up this slope, went Pickett’s charge.
Garnett fell dead. Kemper and Trimble were desperately wounded. Save
Pickett himself, all mounted officers were down. The men fell—the men
fell; Death swung a fearful scythe. There were not now four thousand,
there were not now three thousand. And still the vivid flag went on;
and still, high, thrilling, clear and dauntless, rose from Pickett’s
charge the “rebel yell.”
There was a stone wall to cross. Armistead, his hat upon the point of
his waved sword, leaped upon the coping. A bullet pierced his breast;
he fell, was captured, and the next day died. By now, by now the
charge was whittled thin! Oh, thick as the leaves of Vallombrosa, the
fortress’s dearest and best lay upon that slope beneath the ravens’
wings! On went the thin, fierce ranks, on and over the wall, on and
up, into the midst of the enemy’s guns. The two flags strained toward
each other; the hands of the grey were upon the guns of the blue;
there came a wild mêlée.... There were not two thousand now, and the
guns were yet roaring, and the blue infantry gathered from all
sides....
“The smoke,” says one Luther Hopkins, a grey soldier who was at
Gettysburg, “the smoke rose higher and higher and spread wider and
wider, hiding the sun, and then, gently dropping back, hid from human
eyes the dreadful tragedy. But the battle went on and on, and the roar
of the guns continued. After a while, when the sun was sinking to
rest, there was a hush. The noise died away. The winds came creeping
back from the west, and gently lifting the coverlet of smoke, revealed
a strange sight. The fields were all carpeted, a beautiful carpet, a
costly carpet, more costly than Axminster or velvet. The figures were
horses and men all matted and woven together with skeins of scarlet
thread.”