Glory Road (53 page)

Unconsciously the men huddled in the lee of the building, which was far too flimsy to stop any shell. Noticing this, Meade chuckled grimly—extreme coolness under fire was always his long suit—and he leisurely recounted an anecdote of the Mexican War. At Palo Alto, he recalled, old Zachary Taylor had come upon a wagon driver crouched behind his two-wheeled cart in the midst of a cannonade and had called out: "You damned fool, don't you know you are no safer there than anywhere else?" The driver had replied: "I don't suppose I am, General, but it kinda feels so." Staff no doubt laughed dutifully and rather hollowly, and Meade then decided that there was no sense trying to carry on headquarters business here and moved everybody over to Slocum's headquarters, out of range.
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How long all of this went on no one ever quite seemed sure, and the estimates ranged all the way from thirty minutes to two hours; but eventually, almost imperceptibly, the weight of the bombardment grew less. Hunt had pulled some wrecked batteries out of the II Corps line and was persuading others to cease firing, and along the right of the line many guns had exhausted all of their shell and solid shot. As the Federal firing died down, firing from the Confederate guns slackened also. The smoke still lay heavy between the armies, and Gibbon was trying in vain to peer through it from his post out in front, when the signal station on Little Round Top wigwagged a message to army headquarters: Here come the Rebels!

The smoke lifted like a rising curtain, and all of the great amphitheater lay open at last, and the Yankee soldiers could look west all the way to the belt of trees on Seminary Ridge. They were old soldiers and had been in many battles, but what they saw then took their breath away, and whether they had ten minutes or seventy-five years yet to live, they remembered it until they died. There it was, for the last time in this war, perhaps for the last time anywhere, the grand pageantry and color of war in the old style, beautiful and majestic and terrible: fighting men lined up for a mile and a half from flank to flank, slashed red flags overhead, soldiers marching forward elbow to elbow, officers with drawn swords, sunlight gleaming from thousands of musket barrels, lines dressed as if for parade. Up and down the Federal firing line ran a low murmur: "There they are. . . . There comes the infantry!"

Lee was putting fifteen thousand men into this column—George Pickett riding into storybook immortality with his division of Virginians, Heth's division led today by General Pettigrew, two brigades of Pender's division under General Trimble, coming out of the woods to march across a mile-wide valley to the heights where the Yankees were waiting with shotted guns. Rank after rank came out of the shadows, and the Rebel cannon were all silent now, gunners standing aside to let the infantry come through, and for the moment the Federal guns were silent too, as if both armies were briefly dazzled by the war's most dramatic moment. In the Confederate line there were officers on horseback, and if the Federals looked closely they might have seen one who held his sword high over his head, his black felt hat on the point of it as a guide for his brigade—General Lewis Armistead, who was coming over the valley to meet death and an old friend.

Back in the spring of 1861, when the country was just breaking apart and officers of the regular army were choosing their sides, there was a farewell party one evening in the officers' quarters of the army post at the little California town of Los Angeles. The host was Captain Winfield Scott Hancock, and he was giving the party to say good-by to certain Southern officers who were going east to Richmond, where they would take commissions with the new Confederacy. The departing guests were sad—it was not easy for those regulars to cut loose from the army they had given their lives to— and a tragic shadow lay across the little gathering, and just before the party broke up Mrs. Albert Sidney Johnston sat at the piano and sang "Kathleen Mavourneen." Good-by and good-by, the gray dawn will be breaking soon and our old comradeship in this intimate little army world is fading, it may be for years and it may be forever. When the song was ended Major Armistead came over and put his hands on Hancock's shoulders, tears streaming down his cheeks, and said: "Hancock, good-by—you can never know what this has cost me."
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Then the guests left, and next morning Armistead and the others started east, and a little later Hancock himself came east to fight on the Northern side, and he and Armistead had not seen each other since. Now Hancock was on his horse on Cemetery Ridge, waiting with the guns all around him, and Armistead was coming up the slope with his black felt hat on the end of his sword, and the strange roads of war the two old friends had followed were coming together at last. . . .

Long and bright and perfectly aligned, the lines came down the far slope and began crossing the valley, and the open space in front was dotted by little bursts of smoke as the rival skirmishers began to shoot at each other. This was the moment General Hunt had been waiting for, and all along the left of the Union line the guns opened fire and began to hit those neat ranks, tearing ragged holes in them. On Little Round Top the rifled guns that had been lugged up over the rocks the afternoon before were finding the range, and McGilvery's long line was flaming and crashing, and the Rebels were closing the gaps as they moved forward—no Rebel yell now, the men were corning on silently, they were still out of musket range. The yelling and the firing and the stabbing would come later.

Pickett's division was at the southern end of the advancing line, and Pickett's objective was the clump of trees under which General Webb had been smoking his pipe. Pickett wanted to mass his troops for greater impact, and he had his brigades do a half left wheel to bring them closer to the center. The maneuver was done smartly, and the waiting Yankee infantry praised it, but as the brigades swung around they offered their flanks to McGilvery, and his gunners took cruel advantage. Pickett's men were in the open and the range now was hardly half a mile, and shell ripped down the ranks from end to end, one shell sometimes striking down ten men before it burst. Along Hancock's line the guns were silent, for they had nothing left but canister and they would have to wait for point-blank range. Gibbon was riding along the line—an aide had found a horse for him at last—cautioning his men to take it easy and not to fire until the enemy got in close, and the gray lines came swinging up the rise, nearer and nearer.

Webb's brigade would get it first, and the Confederates continued to crowd in toward the center, building up the strength that would overwhelm the little rectangle of torn, littered ground which the brigade was holding. Webb had two Pennsylvania regiments in line behind a low stone wall that ran just in front of the little clump of trees and extended a few rods toward the north, and the rest of his brigade was on the crest of the ridge, perhaps a hundred yards in the rear. Hancock had put three batteries in here, and they had been almost completely destroyed. Beside the trees and down close to the wall were the two guns that remained of Battery A, 4th U. S., commanded by a girlish-looking young lieutenant named Alonzo (Hushing. The ground around these guns was hell's half acre. Four guns had been dismounted, caissons and limbers had been exploded, nearly all of the horses had been killed, and there were just enough men left to work the two guns that remained. It had been impossible to remove the wounded, and they lay there amid smashed wheels, fragments of wood and indescribable mutilated remains of men and animals. One gunner, dreadfully cut by a shell fragment, had been seen to draw a revolver and put himself out of his pain by shooting himself through the head.

Cushing had been wounded three times, and he was there by his two guns, a sergeant standing beside him to hold him erect and to pass his orders on to the gunners. (He was calling for triple charges of canister.) The Rebel artillery had renewed its fire, and this part of the line was being hit again, and the advancing Rebel infantry was up to the post-and-rail fences by the Emmitsburg road now, barely two hundred yards away. One of Cushing's two guns was knocked out, and he was almost entirely out of ammunition. The Federal infantry opened fire and the smoke cloud settled down again, thick and stifling. Dimly the men behind the wall could see the Confederates coming in over the fences, brigade lines disordered, the spearhead of the charge a great mass of men sweeping over the fences and up the last of the slope like an irresistible stream flowing uphill.
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Farther south the nine-month Vermonters got their chance at last. Hancock was down there with them, pointing to the exposed flank of Pickett's line, and the Vermont regiments swung out, wheeled toward the right, and opened up a blistering flanking fire at close range. Some Pennsylvanians and a New York regiment went in with them, and the Confederate lines here gave way and began to fall back, and as the men wavered McGilvery's cannoneers pounded them afresh, three dozen guns hitting them all at once.

Just south of the clump of trees the stone wall ended and the men had raised a little breastwork of earth. Behind this barrier were the regiments commanded by Colonel Norman J. Hall—the same officer and men who had floated across the Rappahannock in pontoon boats to drive Rebel sharpshooters out of Fredericksburg so many months ago. The advancing Confederates here went down into a little hollow, seeming to vanish from sight. Then they came up out of it, appearing suddenly, as if they had popped up out of the earth, so close that Hall's men could see the expressions on their faces. The breastwork blazed from end to end as the men from Massachusetts and New York and Michigan opened fire. The Rebel line staggered visibly, came to a halt, and opened its own fire in reply, and then it began to drift slowly to its left, toward the dense crowd by the clump of trees.
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In front of Ziegler's Grove, to the north, Pettigrew's division was coming up to the Emmitsburg road. It had lagged slightly behind the rest of the Confederate attack, but it still kept its formation, and Hays's men looked in admiration at the trimness of its lines and, as they admired those lines, made ready to destroy them. The 8th Ohio had been posted west of the road in skirmish formation, and this regiment drew back and got into a little country lane on the Rebel flank and opened fire. Along the ridge and in the grove the Federals waited, and the foremost Federal brigade stood up to level its muskets, and the Rebel line came very near. Then at last every musket and every cannon in this part of the Yankee line opened at once, and the whole Confederate division disappeared in an immense cloud of smoke and dust. Above this boiling cloud the Union men could see a ghastly debris of guns, knapsacks, blanket rolls, severed human heads, and arms and legs and parts of bodies, tossed into the air by the impact of the shot. One observer wrote: "A moan went up from the field, distinctly to be heard amid the roar of battle, but on they went, too much enveloped in smoke and dust now to permit us to distinguish their lines of movement, for the mass appeared more like a cloud of moving smoke and dust than a column of troops."
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The mass rolled in closer, the Federals firing into the center of the storm cloud. The men with the improvised buckshot cartridges in smoothbore guns had a target they could not miss, and the XI Corps artillery on Cemetery Hill was sending shell in through the gaps in the Yankee line. Suddenly Pettigrew's men passed the limit of human endurance and the lines broke apart and the hillside was covered with men running for cover, and the Federal gunners burned the ground with shell and canister
. On the Uttered field, amid all
the dead and wounded, prostrate men could be seen holding up handkerchiefs in sign of surrender.

But if the right and left of the charging Confederate line had been smashed, the center was still coming on. Cushing fired his last remaining charge, and a bu
llet hit him in the mouth and kill
ed him. Most of t
he Pennsylvanians behind the wall
sprang up and ran back to the crest, and the few who remained were overwhelmed as the Rebel line rolled in and beat the life out of them. Most of the Rebels stayed behind the wall or crowded in amid the clump of trees and opened fire on the Yankees on the crest, their red battle flags clustering thick, m
en in front lying prone or kneeli
ng, men in the rear standing and firing over their heads. A handful leaped over the wall, Armistead in the lead, and ran in among the wreckage of Cushing's battery. Armistead's horse
had been kil
led and his hat was down on the hilt of his sword now, but the sword was still held high, and through the curling smoke the Union soldiers got a final glimpse of him, one triumphant hand resting on a silent cannon.
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This was the climax and the bloody indisputable pay-off; the next few minutes would tell the story, and what that story would be would all depend on whether these blue-coated soldiers really meant it. There were more Federals than Confederates on the field, but right here where the fighting was going on there were more Confederates than Federals, and every man was firing in a wild, feverish haste, with the smoke settling down thicker and thicker. From the peach orchard Confederate guns were shooting straight into the Union line, disregarding the danger that some of their own men would be hit, and the winging missiles tore ugly lanes through the disorganized mass of Yankees.

A fresh Union regiment was moving up through Ziegler's Grove, and as the men came out into the open they heard the uproar of battle different from any they had ever heard before—"strange and terrible, a sound that came from thousands of human throats, yet was not a commingling of shouts and yells but rather like a vast mournful roar." There was no cheering, but thousands of men were growling and cursing without realizing it as they fought to the utmost limit of primal savagery. The 19th Massachusetts was squarely before the clump of trees, and the Confederate mass kept crowding forward, and for a time the file closers in the rear of the Massachusetts regiment joined hands and held the thin line in place by sheer strength.
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