After this outbreak, which we all knew preceded a charge, there came the usual confusion, accompanied by the yells and indescribable ugly sounds, the echo of which seems to chill one's blood, even now.
In this confusion and rush, I nearly lost my horse; he had torn loose from his fastenings, in the jam and tear of artillery, breaking to the rear along the road; he was retreating in disorder among the boys of the Eleventh Corps. When I caught up with him and mounted again, there was a crowd of infantrymen jamming along the road. It is a fact that a "doboy," as we cavalrymen called the infantry, instinctively hates a cavalryman of his own army as much as he does that of the enemy, so that, in my isolated predicament, in trying to navigate my horse along a road filled with excited Germans, with bayonets on their guns, I had, literally, a hard road to travel.
I intended to go back to the Seminary, which I had recently left, thinking it the best place to get a good view of the field. I was steering my horse in that direction, down the main street of the town, when I discovered that, seemingly, everybody was coming away from there.
It looked as if the show was over and the crowd was rushing along the streets, as if anxious to catch the first car, or the last train.
I did not realize that it was a retreat until I saw riding up the road, in a direction away from the Seminary, a cavalcade, which I knew to be a General and Staff.
It was General Doubleday. The handsome General, erect and dignified at the head of his Staff, was riding alone with a bearing very much as I have witnessed other Generals on the fancy parades at the head of the column of play soldiers.
Except for an angry flush on his face, and evidently in a bad humor about something that had gone wrong, he was as cool as I have seen him since on ordinary occasions.
On looking through the dusty and crowded streets that dreadful afternoon toward the Seminary, which I had so recently left some distance inside of our lines, I was astonished beyond measure to see that a battery was right in the middle of the road firing like all nation toward us. It has always remained one of the great surprises of my life to understand how that Rebel battery could possibly have gotten through our army so suddenly and have been firing shells down the road into our retreating column from our hill, when I thought, according to the tactics, it ought to have been two or three miles out of the road on their own hill. The frequent shots did not hasten General Doubleday's pace a particle; he kept on giving his orders in a sullen, ill-natured tone, but walked his horse as slowly as if heading a funeral procession.
My young heart was distressed to see that our men were beginning to pour into the main street from every direction—all were eagerly making for the main road through town to Cemetery Hill.
It was very much as if a church, or theatre, had been dismissed in a panic; the people who were in the side aisles were rushing down on the crowds in the main entrance, so that everything became blocked by the confusion worse confounded.