The birds were gone from the trees, the cattle from the fields, the children from the lanes and the brookside. All left on the first day. There was a hollow between Round Top and Devil’s Den, and into this the anxious farmers had driven and penned a herd of cattle. On the sunny, calm afternoon when they had done this, they could not conceive that any battle would affect this hollow. Here the oxen, the cows, would be safe from chance bullet and from forager. But the farmers did not guess the might of that battle.
The stream of shells was directed against Round Top, but a number, black and heavy, rained into the hollow. A great, milk-white ox was the first wounded. He lay with his side ripped open, a ghastly sight. Then a cow with calf was mangled, then a young steer had both fore legs broken. Bellowing, the maddened herd rushed here and there, attacking the rough sides of the hollow. Death and panic were upon the slopes as well as at the bottom of the basin. A bursting shell killed and wounded a dozen at once. The air grew thick and black, and filled with the cry of the cattle.
A courier, returning to his general after delivering an order, had his horse shot beneath him. Disentangling himself, he went on, on foot, through a wood. He was intolerably thirsty—and lo, a spring! It was small and round and clear like a mirror, and as he knelt he saw his own face and thought, “She wouldn’t know me.” The minies were so continuously singing that he had ceased to heed them. He drank, then saw that he was reddening the water. He did not know when he had been wounded, but now, as he tried to rise, he grew so faint and cold that he knew that Death had met him.... There was moss and fern and a nodding white flower. It wasn’t a bad place in which to die. In a pocket within his grey jacket he had a daguerreotype—a young and smiling face and form. His fingers were so nerveless now that it was hard to get the little velvet case out, and when it was out it proved to be shattered, it and the picture within. The smiling face and form were all marred, unrecognizable. So small a thing, perhaps!—but it made the bitterness of this soldier’s death. The splintered case in his hands, he died as goes to sleep a child who has been unjustly punished. His body sank deep among the fern, his chest heaved, he shook his head faintly, and then it dropped upon the moss, between the stems of the nodding white flower.
A long Confederate line left a hillside and crossed an open space of corn-field and orchard. Double-quick it moved, under its banners, under the shells shrieking above. The guns changed range, and an iron flail struck the line. It wavered, wavered. A Federal line leaped a stone wall, and swept forward, under its banners, hurrahing. Midway of the wide open there was stretched beneath the murky sky a narrow web—woof of grey, warp of blue. The strip held while the heart beat a minute or more, then it parted. The blue edge went backward over the plain; the grey edge, after a moment, rushed after. “Yaaaiihhh! Yaaaiiihhhh!” it shouted,—and its red war-flag glowed like fire. The grey commander-in-chief watched from a hillside, a steady light in his eyes. Over against him on another hill, Meade, the blue general, likewise watched. To the south, across the distant Potomac, lay the vast, beleaguered, Southern fortress. Its gate had opened; out had poured a vast sally party, a third of its bravest and best, and at the head the leader most trusted, most idolized. Out had rushed the Army of Northern Virginia. It had crossed the moat of the Potomac; it was here, on the beleaguer’s ground.
Earth and heaven were shaking with the clangour of two shields. The sky was whirring and dim, but there might be imagined, suspended there, a huge balance—here the besiegers, here the fortress’s best and bravest. Which would this day, or these days, tip the beam? Much hung upon that—all might be said to hang upon that. The waves on the plain rolled forward, rolled back, rolled forward. When the sun went down the first day the fortress’s battle-flag was in the ascendant.
A great red barn was the headquarters of “Dear Dick Ewell.” He rode with Gordon and others at a gallop down a smoky road between stone fences. “Wish Old Jackson was here!” he said. “Wish Marse Robert had Old Jackson! This is the watershed, General Gordon—yes, sir! this is the watershed of the war! If it doesn’t still go right to-day—It seems to me that wall there’s got a suspicious look—”
The wall in question promptly justified the suspicion. There came from behind it a volley that emptied grey saddles.
Gordon heard the thud of the minie as it struck “Old Dick.” “Are you hurt, sir? Are you hurt?”
“No, no, General! I’m not hurt. But if that ball had struck you, sir, we’d have had the trouble of carrying you off the field. I’m a whole lot better fixed than you for a fight! It don’t hurt a mite to be shot in a wooden leg.”
Three grey soldiers lay behind a shock of wheat. They were young men, old schoolmates. This wheat-shock marked the farthest point attained in a desperate charge made by their regiment against a larger force. It was one of those charges in which everybody sees that if a miracle happens it will be all right, and that if it doesn’t happen—It was one of those charges in which first an officer stands out, waving his sword, then a man or two follow him, then three or four more, then all waver back, only to start forth again, then others join, then the officer cries aloud, then, with a roar, the line springs forward and rushes over the field, in the cannon’s mouth. Such had been the procedure in this charge. The miracle had not happened. After a period of mere din as of ocean waves the three found themselves behind this heap of tarnished gold. When, gasping, they looked round, all their fellows had gone back; they saw them a distant torn line, still holding the flag. Then a rack of smoke came between, hiding flag and all. The three seemed alone in the world. The wheat-ears made a low inner sound like reeds in quiet marshes. The smoke lifted just enough to let a muddy sunlight touch an acre of the dead.