38 Battle’s Shift and Change

Nothing was more peculiar than the chances and changes of this strange and furious battle, brought on without intent, but, once begun, fought with a fierceness unparalleled, often hand to hand, and fortune shifting from one side to the other with a fickleness and rapidity that dazed the combatants, but did not take from them their courage or fighting power. There was, too, a remarkable succession of commanders, particularly on the Northern side, as throughout the day new divisions, called by messengers or the sound of the guns, were continually hurrying to the field, and bringing with them generals of higher and still higher rank. Doubleday had been superseded a half hour before noon by Howard, who, looking from the roof of one of the houses, saw all the roads out of the west and northwest covered with Southern troops marching to the field of battle; but, raising his eyes to the east and northeast, he could see no more Northern soldiers, and, feeling that Gettysburg must be held, no matter what happened, he sent urgent messengers, some for more troops, and one to Meade himself, telling him that the great day had come.

The forces on the Southern side were steadily increasing, and fortune was certainly hovering over their bayonet points. But the North suffered her terrible losses and did not yield. The Bucktails and their companion regiments saw their numbers melt away under the fire of the cannon and the rifles, their ranks become thin and broken, but they knotted them up again like a broken whiplash, and still presented a continuous line.

Shaftoe and I stood among the troops, still unhurt, but mere brown masks of men, covered with dust, in which the rills of perspiration had ploughed little gullies, our features distorted with the long strain and fever of battle, our throats and lips dry and burning. We had lost our horses long since in the shift and change of the battle. We had lost touch, too, with our officers, and our only plan now was to stand where the fight was thickest.

We noticed the momentary lull that usually precedes a heavy attack. Shaftoe instantly let the stock of his carbine fall to earth and drew deep breaths. Then he took a chew of tobacco.

“It’s the best that I can do now,” he said, “but I’d give my chance of promotion for a good dinner.”

I was looking at the field which was strewn as far as I could see with the fallen. Shaftoe was looking toward the hills behind Gettysburg.

“I wish we were there,” he said. “It’s a better place to fight than this. Since we’ve got to lick the Southerners back into the Union, and make ’em happy after we’ve done it, it’s well to take all the advantages we can while we’re doing it.”

“We may be in that position sooner than we wish,” I said. “The Southern army seems to have made up its mind to drive us there, and farther.”

“There’s one thing I’d rather see coming than a good dinner,” said Shaftoe.

“What’s that?”

“A million of our men—yes, at least a million good fresh Northern soldiers, with ten thousand pieces of the heaviest artillery; then I’d feel safe. Boy, never despise the value of numbers on your side. Always have ’em if you can. The best general isn’t always the one that fights the bravest, but the one that gets there first with the biggest army and the heaviest guns. I’ve read about old Napoleon, and he always did it. That’s why he won. If I was a general, expected by a confident country to win everything, I’d have it put in my contract, first thing, that I was to have ten times as many men and ten times as many cannon as the fellow I was to whip. Then let the sneaking hound come on!”

I looked with admiration at this man who could speak so calmly at such a moment. Then I saw a movement in the Southern lines. Heavy masses of infantry were gathering on the slopes, batteries were moved forward, and suddenly they opened fire from many great guns upon our lines. Beneath this shower of iron, and protected by it, the Southern troops advanced.

“They are coming!” I exclaimed.

“I sha’n’t disturb myself over their coming until they have come,” said Shaftoe.

The solid mass of the Southern army heaved forward, moving over the ground as if it were a single body. The smoke from the artillery behind hung over it like a veil, but between the veil and the earth the faces of the men stood out sharp and clear.

The Northern artillery answered the Southern, but was inferior and was gradually beaten down by the opposing shot and shell. The cannoneers were killed beside their guns, and the guns themselves were crushed by the weight of so much iron hurled unceasingly upon them.

“We shall have our hardest nut to crack now,” said Shaftoe. “It’s luck that we’ve got stone walls and fences and railway cuts and roads here to help us.”

I saw well enough that it was a moment of hazard to the army. The dense columns of the enemy, their evident determination, their powerful supporting artillery, the deadly accuracy of their fire, were sufficient proof to a soldier of any experience that the defence must now be of the most desperate kind. Our front ranks had begun already to fire their rifles, volley after volley, sending the bullets straight into the oncoming mass. But it did not stop the Southern advance. They fired their own volleys, too, as they approached, until they were so near that their artillery ceased for a moment lest its shells should strike friends as well as enemies. Then the invading mass heaved up with a mighty effort and hurled itself bodily upon us.

I felt the bank of smoke and fire swell out and envelop me. I saw the points of many bayonets and a wave of faces sweeping down upon me, while the crash of cannon and rifles and the voices of shouting men filled my ears. The front ranks of the defenders were crushed and driven back in fragments, and then I found myself with Shaftoe and others behind the shelter of a stone wall firing bullets, as fast as human hand could crowd them into carbines, into the wall of fire and smoke in front of us.

It was no longer an ordered battle, precise, arranged by mathematics, and directed by skilful generals, but a melee, a hurly-burly, a wild, confused conflict, in which each man fought for himself, and the passions were let loose to show of what the human race can be capable in its wildest moments of battle fever. It seemed to me that we had all gone mad together.

The Southern generals were watching the smoke bank in which we were fighting, eager to see it move forward, past the walls and fences, and then envelop the rear lines of the Northern army, but it hovered at the same spot over the slopes. The Southern line broke in vain upon the stone and wooden barriers, but there was no lack of courage and of sacrifice. Officers and men rushed forward together, and offered their breasts to the bullets and cannon balls, but the slopes could not be carried. The smoke bank thinned gradually; the spurts of flame decreased, and the black figures, like so much tracery which had struggled in the cloud, resolved themselves into human figures. Then the smoke bank split entirely apart, like a cheese cut down the centre by a knife, and the Southern lines fell back, leaving us gasping and panting, but still holding the slope, while between lay the price that both had paid.

The attack had failed.

The Southern generals beheld the repulse, but, undismayed, turned at once to new movements. They were about to advance now in concert and with all their strength. The Southern trumpets which had been heard first west of the town, then northwest, and then north, now sounded from the northeast too. The invading force enveloped Gettysburg in a great semicircle, a gray coil, which was to compress and crush everything within its folds. Ewell, the Southern general, looked down from a ridge, and saw three Southern brigades approaching from the east side of Rock Creek, the stream whose banks were so high in places that it seemed to form a natural barrier, and he rejoiced, knowing that another fold of the Southern coil was now closing in on Gettysburg.

Some of these new troops, coming while the chances of the battle still fluctuated, were from the farthest South, and among them were the Georgians, tall, bigboned men, but fair like nearly all the Americans, now a thousand miles from home, full of courage and proud of their march into the enemy’s country. The signal was given to these Georgians to cross the creek and fall upon our flank, and they obeyed. Before them lay the creek with its fringe of willow trees, and beyond was a field of wheat, shining like gold in the sun. Our batteries opened upon them with many guns, but the Georgians reached the rows of willows, and in a moment their gray uniforms blended with the greenish gray of the trees. Then they passed through the fringe and plunged clown the slopes of the creek, their caps lingering in sight for a last moment like long rows of heads without bodies. Then they were gone, but our artillery poured a curving fire into the creek bed. The line of caps reappeared on the nearer shore and after them the bodies of the Georgians, still advancing with the long Southern stride that eats up the ground, the lines in even array, unbroken by the willows, the rocky gorge, the ascent, or the shells that burst among them. They raised their bayonets for a charge, and the sunlight flashed from them in fire. In front waved the banner with a single star.

I saw this advance, and I noticed the rapid play of colour, the yellow of the wheat like beaten gold, the steel of the bayonets like dark silver, the gray of the uniforms shading off into a weather-stained brown, and the faces of the men growing eager as they approached their enemy. On came the Georgians through the wheat; the yellow straws twisted about them, sometimes wound around their bayonets, and tried to hold them back, but they paid no heed to such slender resistance, and, firing a volley, rushed with the bayonet upon our flank.

Our line crumpled up before their blow, and their watchful general, beholding the result and knowing the value of successive strokes, hurled fresh masses upon us. Once more the combat became hand to hand, and, spreading like a flame, raged along the entire front; but their general, not content with one blow, or two, struck three and four and more, picking up regiments with his hand, as it were, and throwing them straight at the vital point. Fortune, so fickle, made a decision, for the day at least, and she chose the South. The issue could no longer be doubtful.

There are few things more terrible than the rout of an army. The success of one is the defeat of the other; the glory of this is the ruin of that, and men are an unreckoned trifle. Our command was divided, order and cohesion were lost, cannon were overturned, men knew not what to do. The Southern general continued to drive forward his wedge, and our column, decimated by the cannon and rifles, racked through and through by many hours of hard fighting, split like a rotten log. But it had done as much as human flesh and bones could stand.

Then the rout began, the wild pell-mell of men who know that they can not fight any longer, and obey the human impulse, the animal instinct, to save themselves. We were all swept back together; at some points our resistance had been successful at first, but when the main part of the line was crushed these detached defenders were involved in the general wreck, and back all were driven, the gallant Bucktails, everybody, a torrent of fugitives, beaten by bullets and cannon balls, and conscious that we had fought so long and so well, only to lose. I looked up at the smoky sun, and it marked mid-afternoon.

“Isn’t there time to save the battle yet?” I asked of Shaftoe.

“There’ll be no saving for us unless we can rally on those hills yonder,” replied the veteran, pointing to the slopes of Cemetery Ridge, now gilded by the western sun. “Bobby Lee, if he’s back there, is not the man to let a beaten Yankee army retreat in carriages.”

The rout grew wilder; the people of Gettysburg, who had awaited with such trembling hopes through all those anxious hours, saw it coming, and they knew that once again the Army of Northern Virginia had won, as it seemed destined always to win. The Southern line extended and pressed everything toward a common centre, Gettysburg. It swept over the hills and hollows and past the fences and stone walls, over the wreck of regiments and batteries, past the slopes for whose possession they had fought so long, and as this line approached Gettysburg, its semicircle contracted, and the line thickened and compressed our beaten army, concentrating its fire upon it, and dealing it blows incessant, and steadily growing heavier. Twenty batteries delivered their shot into the mass of retreating men, and the watchers in Gettysburg deemed us all lost.

The flight went on; our beaten brigades lost men at every step; only the core of our force, the body of the strongest in the centre, could hold together; beyond this the regiments were shattered, and the wreck was swept up like driftwood before a flood. Then our crushed army fled through Gettysburg, leaving a great slice of itself there in the enemy’s hands, toward the hills beyond.

The sun was yet high above the distant mountains; there was still time before nightfall to take or save an army, and we of the North, or rather the fraction of us still able to fight, now witnessed another change of leadership for which that day was so remarkable: Hancock arrived, and by right of rank superseded Howard. Like his predecessors, his efforts were to save; the battle of that day was lost, no one could deny it; but there would be a to-morrow, and one might fight again.

We reached the slopes of Cemetery Hill at last and were protected by some reserve men with artillery, who had dug intrenchments and prepared this refuge, so welcome to the routed battalions. Then we could rest a little and look upon what was left. But what a sight we saw! The battle, opened by mere detachments, had been fought from first to last by forty thousand men—twenty-three thousand for the South and seventeen thousand for the North. Of those seventeen thousand, only a scant five thousand had escaped to the hills; all the others had fallen or been taken, and the South had suffered an equal list of killed and wounded. From Oak Hill, through Gettysburg to Cemetery Ridge, was one wide path of red ruin; the five thousand could have the gloomy consolation of knowing that they had fought all day, and until two thirds of their number had been lost, a record that few battlefields in the history of the world could show. It was something to know that we had fought so well even if we had lost, and we were not without this sanguinary pride.

We took only a few moments for breath, and when we felt the rugged slopes of the hills, the natural fortifications under our feet, we faced the enemy again, expecting a new attack and ready to resist it; there were yet two or three hours of sun, and an enemy so energetic as ours would not leave us alone.

The attack did not come. The Southern brigades were swarming in Gettysburg, and some of the generals were eager to lead them on against Cemetery Hill, but there was a division of counsels, and they lingered. Our troops at once reformed their lines, posted their artillery, made new breastworks, and waited; meanwhile Slocum arrived and superseded Hancock, being the sixth man to command the Northern army on that remarkable day.

The sun set on the red battlefield, the town, the hills, the thousands of fallen and the soldiers who waited. The thunder and crash of the battle sank to the intermittent crackle of musketry, and then to the hum and rumble of voices and marching men.

The day ended. The dying, turning their eyes to the west, saw above the hills the last red glow of the sunken sun.

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