Glory Road (50 page)

The division Hancock had sent over was forced to retreat, more than a third of its men killed or wounded, three of its four brigade commanders shot down. (Among them was Colonel Cross, carried to the rear in one of the ambulances which he had gaily said would not be needed this day, wounded mortally.) When this division fled the regulars were flanked, and as they went back toward Plum Run they crossed open marshy ground and came under a storm of musket fire, losing nine hundred of their two thousand men. The skipper of the 11th U. S. Infantry reported grimly that he had lost half of his men "without inflicting the slightest damage upon the enemy."
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Of Birney's entire line, reinforcements and all, nothing whatever was left except a dense carpet of dead and wounded men lying on the ground, and broken waves of fugitives going back toward Cemetery Ridge, some in good order and under control, some altogether out of control and in no order whatever. And there was a huge gap in the line of the Army of the Potomac.

This gap immediately got bigger. After the peach orchard fell, Humphreys's line along the Emmitsburg road was doomed, particularly so since a division of A. P. Hill's men assaulted it in front while Longstreet's men were flanking it from the south. As the left end of this line began to crumble the artillery had to leave. Humphreys tried desperately to swing his line back so that he could maintain contact with the troops that had been driven out of Birney's line, but he found that there was nothing left to maintain contact with and the Rebels were getting his own line under what he later described as one of the hottest rifle and artillery fires he ever saw.

Near the orchard some Massachusetts gunners were removing their guns by hand, all horses having been killed, and a man who watched them wrote that "it is a mystery to me that they were not all hit by the enemy's fire, as they were surrounded and fired upon from almost every direction." Humphreys was riding amid the thickest of the fighting. A captain on his staff threw up his hands and cried, "I'm shot!" Humphreys rode up beside him to hold him in his saddle, when a cannon ball went through the wounded officer's horse and tore the head off an orderly who was starting to lead it to the rear, and Humphreys's own horse, already six times wounded, got another bullet and sprang into the air, throwing the general to the earth. Humphreys got up, took an aide's horse, and went on trying to patch up his collapsing line.
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Things had gone past the point where a general could help much. The 7th New Jersey was coming forward on the run up a narrow lane, and it collided with a Federal battery going to the rear, frantic drivers lashing frantic horses, battery and infantry hopelessly tangled in the cramped dirt road, guns overlapping guns and locking wheels. The 2nd New Hampshire, running back from the peach orchard, got involved in the mess, and Rebel skirmishers trotted forward and took the whole mad turmoil of yelling men and plunging horses under fire, and a few companies of the New Jersey regiment tried a bayonet charge just in time to be routed by a new Rebel line. Barksdale was push
ing his Mississippians on relentl
essly, riding back and forth behind the infantry lines, driving his men on. One of Humphreys's brigadiers detailed an entire company to concentrate its fire on the man, and at last Barksdale went down mortally wounded, with five bullets in his body.

On the Emmitsburg road, regiments were going to pieces in smoke and fire, trying to cope with a flank attack and at the same time beat back a heavy assault from in front. The colonel of the 11th New Jersey was shot as he began to put his regiment through a confused left wheel. The major took over and spun round like a top when a bullet caught him in the knee. Someone notified the senior captain that he was in command, but he was killed just as he got the news, and the captain who took over from him was immediately wounded. Four men picked him up to take him to the rear, all four were shot down, and the captain was hit again and killed. One more captain tried to take charge and was killed, and a corporal finally rallied what was left of the regiment behind a little hedge.
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At the right of Humphreys's line, Gibbon had sent forward two regiments from his division to try to fill the gap between the two army corps. A whole Rebel brigade hit them and tore them apart, and their commander, Colonel George Ward of the 15th Massachusetts, who had lost a leg at Ball's Bluff and was now going around on an ill-fitting peg, went stumping along the line with a cane in one hand and a sword in the other, until a Confederate rifleman killed him, and what was left of the two regiments went to the rear. The 12th New Hampshire hung on for a while by a log house beside the Emmitsburg road, and a Rebel battle line suddenly appeared over a rise in ground just in front, yelling and firing like mad, and the two battle lines volleyed at point-blank range in blinding smoke.

For a few minutes the Union line there held as the sun went low and the smoke brought the dusk in ahead of time, and back on Cemetery Ridge an officer saw unreal drama in the parallel battle lines: "The smoke of their rifles encircled them, the flashes lighted up the field upon which the shadows of evening were advancing, and the scene resembled one of those battles which are seen in pictures, where the lines of battle are formed with mathematical exactness." Then Confederate guns around the peach orchard came into action and the Yankee line broke, and the Rebel columns advanced with wild cheers.
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Between the Round Tops and Hancock's position there was nothing now except a vast, disordered retreat. The III Corps was altogether out of the fight, and its survivors were going east for the reverse slope of the ridge, to reorganize there if possible, but in any case to get there, out of the danger zone. The brigades that had gone in as reinforcements had suffered heavy losses and, like Sickles's men, were at least temporarily out of action. Most of Slocum's corps had been ordered down from the right of the line, but it had not arrived yet, and great masses of Rebel soldiers were coming up the slope almost unopposed.

Sickles had been carried to the rear, one leg gone—he went back jauntily, smoking a cigar, game enough for a regiment—and Meade told Hancock to take charge and stop the rout. It was a good choice, for Hancock was probably the best combat general on the Federal side that day. Yet neither Meade, Hancock, nor anyone else could do anything unless somewhere, on that long slanting plain, some of the fighting men dug their heels in and bought a little time. There was not much any general could do about this. If out of what it originally was and what it had learned the army had developed the swift instinctive reflexes which are all that will serve in the moment of disaster, then the situation might be saved—by Meade, by Hancock, or by sheer good luck. If not, then the war was about over.

For ten minutes or so it would be entirely up to the gunners. Lieutenant Colonel Freeman McGilvery of the artillery reserve had been pulling batteries and parts of batteries out of the retreat, and he was building up a line of two dozen guns just behind Plum Run. It was an army axiom that guns unsupported by infantry could not hope to beat off a charge, but the gunners averaged pretty tough in this army and McGilvery proposed to see what they could do on their own. While he was organizing the line he sent word out to Captain John Bigelow, who had the 9th Massachusetts battery posted in the barnyard of a farmer named Trostle, a few rods west of Plum Run, informing Bigelow that no matter what happened the Rebels must be held off until this new rank of guns could be installed.

The Massachusetts boys had never been in action before this day but they were making up for it very fast. Several Confederate batteries had their range and were firing fast and accurately, but Rebel infantry was coming in so close that Bigelow told his men to forget about counter-battery fire and knock off the foot soldiers. For a time the gunners loaded their guns with canister all the way to the muzzles, firing at pistol range, and then they switched to shell with the fuses cut entirely off so that the projectiles would explode the instant they left the muzzles of the guns. Fighting thus, they gained just the time McGilvery needed, and when he finally called them in the battery had lost half of its men, sixty of its horses, four of its six guns, and all of its officers.
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McGilvery's guns no sooner opened fire than the Rebel infantry charged home. A Mississippi regiment which had overrun Bigelow's guns followed the survivors in, broke in among McGilvery's guns, and got into a desperate hand-to-hand fight with the cannoneers, who hit them with rammers and handspikes and even grappled with them like rowdies rioting back of the grandstand at the county fair, everybody yelling and cursing, officers firing pistols, dense smoke settling down over everything. One entire regular battery was put out of action, and for a moment it seemed that this Mississippi regiment might break all the way through and get into the Union rear. But the fire of the other pieces never stopped, and the rest of the Confederate line was compelled to halt, and the Mississippians at last sullenly withdrew.
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It was getting dark and the air was streaky and blurred with smoke, and the advancing Confederate masses were almost indistinguishable in the twilight. Reinforcements were coming up from the Union right and rear at last, and officers were casting forward looking for the spots where these new troops were needed the most.

Among these officers was Hancock, and he saw a Confederate brigade advancing toward him, its uneven line coming up out of a little hollow a hundred yards off. He trotted back, saw a Union regiment coming up in column of fours, and galloped over to it. It was the 1st Minnesota out of his own corps. Hancock pointed to the Rebel line, whose flags were just visible in the murk.

"Do you see those colors?" he demanded. The regiment's Colonel Colville had just been released from arrest, which he had incurred by refusing to make his men wade a creek on the march north. He looked forward and nodded laconically.

"Well, capture them!" barked Hancock.

Down the ridge came the 1st Minnesota, still in column of fours, and it hit the slightly disordered Rebel column and knocked it back. The Rebels quickly rallied from the shock—they greatly outnumbered this lone Minnesota regiment—and they formed a firing line in the underbrush and woods on the edge of the ravine, and the Minnesota men swung into a line of their own, and the fire lit the dusk like great flashes of irregular sheet lightning. The Confederates worked their way around on each flank and got the 1st Minnesota into a pocket, sending their fire in from three sides, and the whole war had suddenly come to a focus in this smoky hollow, with a few score Westerners trading their lives for the time the army needed. Off to the left McGilvery saw what was up, and while the Confederate batteries by the Emmitsburg road concentrated their fire on him he swung his guns around and pounded the underbrush with canister, and on the other side Hancock found some more troops and sent them in. After a time the Confederates began to draw back, and when they came out into the open the guns hit them hard, and finally they went into full retreat.

What was left of the Minnesota regiment came back to reorganize. It had taken 262 men into action and it had 47 men left, and the survivors boasted that while the casualties amounted to 82 per cent (which seems to have been a record for the Union Army for the entire war) there was not a straggler or a prisoner of war on the entire list.
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They had not captured the flag that Hancock had asked them to capture, but they still had their own flag and a great name, plus those 47 exhausted survivors, and as they came back it might have been as John Bunyan wrote: "So he passed over, and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side."

North of there Meade himself was on the firing line, and he and his staff saw another advancing Confederate line which had got clear up on top of the ridge and was possessing itself of some Union cannon. For a moment it seemed that no one but the commanding general was there to meet this assault, but an officer cried, "There they come, General!" and looking back, Meade saw a Federal battle line coming in on the run. He spurred back, waved his hat toward the Rebels, and started riding forward again in the middle of the firing line, hat still in his hand, calling to his staff: "Come on, gentlemen!" His aides finally got him out of the front line, the line charged, the Confederates ran back out of the guns and down the slope, and Cemetery Ridge was clear.
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Behind the ridge there was a great tangle of men and animals and equipment, jammed together like the debris of a hopelessly defeated army. On the hillsides, beaten regiments and brigades tried to reassemble. Walking wounded were limping toward the rear, ambulances were clattering down the bumpy roads, broken batteries were jolting back for a refit, and dazed stragglers and non-combatants were wandering about in a daze, drifting back and forth like the shreds of smoke that came seeping in through the trees from the west. Over all there rolled a great pall of sound: many guns firing, an unending crackle and sputter of small arms, and above all the yelling and screaming of many men. Slocum's corps was being moved up, and one column was coming along a country lane in the twilight, marching toward a firing line which it could not yet see; and it seemed to these men that the high screech of the Rebel yell coming out of the darkness ahead "was more devilish than anything which
could
come from human throats." These men were veterans, but there was something about this twilight march, with those unearthly cries just ahead, which put them on the edge of panic.