One thing was evident to General Gordon. His opponent proposed to trust to the bayonet and attempt to break through Lee's centre by the sheer weight of his deep charging column. It might be done. Here were four lines of blue marching on the one in gray. How should the charge be met? By immediate and steady fire, or by withholding his fire till the lines were face to face, and then pouring upon the Federals a blighting storm of lead? Gordon decided on the latter, believing that a sudden and withering burst of deadly hail in the faces of men with empty guns would be more than any troops could stand.
All the horses were sent to the rear and the men were ordered to lie down in the grass, they being told by their officers that the Federals were coming with unloaded guns, trusting to the bayonet, and that not a shot must be heard until the word "Fire!" was given. This would not be until the Federals were close at hand. In the old Revolutionary phrase, they must wait "till they saw the whites of their eyes."
On came the long lines, still as steady and precise in movement as if upon holiday drill. Not a rifle-shot was heard. Neither side had artillery at this point, and no roar of cannon broke the strange silence. The awaiting boys in gray grew eager and impatient and had to be kept in restraint by their officers. "Wait! wait for the word!" was the admonition. Yet it was hard to lie there while that line of bayonets came closer and closer, until the eagles on the buttons of the blue coats could be seen, and at length the front rank was not twenty yards away.
The time had come. With all the power of his lungs Gordon shouted out the word "Fire!" In an instant there burst from the prostrate line a blinding blaze of light, and a frightful hail of bullets rent through the Federal ranks. Terrible was the effect of that consuming volley. Almost the whole front rank of the foe seemed to go down in a mass. The brave commander and his horse fell in a heap together. In a moment he was on his feet; it was the horse, not the man, that the deadly bullet had found.
In an instant more the recumbent Confederates were on their feet, an appalling yell bursting from their throats as they poured new volleys upon the Federal lines. No troops on earth could have faced that fire without a chance to reply. Their foes bore unloaded guns. Not a bayonet had reached the breast for which it was aimed. The lines recoiled, though in good order for men swept by such a blast of death. Large numbers of them had fallen, yet not a drop of blood had been lost by one of Gordon's men.
The gallant man who led the Federals was not yet satisfied that the bayonet could not break the ranks of his foes. Reforming his men, now in three lines, he led them again with empty guns to the charge. Again they were driven back with heavy loss. With extraordinary persistence he clung to his plan of winning with the bayonet, coming on again and again until four fruitless charges had been made on Gordon's lines, not a man in which had fallen, while the Federal loss had been very heavy. Not until convinced by this sanguinary evidence that the day of the bayonet was past did he order his men to load and open fire on the hostile lines. It was an experiment in an obsolete method of warfare which had proved disastrous to those engaged in it.
Gordon House.
In the remaining hours of that desperate conflict Gordon and his men had another experience to face. The fire from both sides grew furious and deadly, and at nightfall, when the carnage ceased, so many of the soldiers in gray had fallen that, as one of the officers afterward said, he could have walked on the dead bodies of the men from end to end of the line. How true this was Gordon was unable to say, for by this time he was himself a wreck, fairly riddled with bullets.
As he tells us, his previous record was remarkably reversed in this fight, and we cannot better close our story than with a description of his new experience. He had hitherto seemed almost to bear a charmed life. While numbers had fallen by his side in battle, and his own clothing had been often pierced and torn by balls and fragments of shells, he had not lost a drop of blood, and his men looked upon him as one destined by fate not to be killed in battle. "They can't hit him;" "He's as safe in one place as another," form a type of the expressions used by them, and Gordon grew to have much the same faith in his destiny, as he passed through battle after battle unharmed.