A little later a party of discouraged Confederates raised a piece of a white shelter tent above the works as a flag of truce and offered to surrender. The Union soldiers called on them to jump over. They sprang on the breastworks and hesitated a moment at the sight of so many leveled guns. That moment was fatal to them for their comrades in the rear poured a volley into them, killing nearly every one.
All day long the battle raged. Different breastworks in the same fortifications flaunted different flags. Gradually, however, all along the line the firing and the fighting concentrated at the Angle. The head logs there were so cut and torn that they looked like brooms. So heavy was the fire that several large oak trees twenty-two inches in diameter back of the works were gnawed down by the bullets and fell, injuring some of the South Carolina troops. Toward dusk the Union troops were nearly exhausted. Each man had fired between three and four hundred rounds. Their lips were black and bleeding from biting cartridge. Their shoulders and hands were coated and black with grime and powder-dust. As soon as it became dark they dropped in the knee-deep mud from utter exhaustion. But they held. Grimly, sternly they held. All the long night through they fired away at the breastworks. The trenches on the right of the Angle ran red with Union blood and had to be cleared many a time of the piles of dead bodies which choked them. At last, a little after midnight, sullenly and slowly the Confederate forces drew back and the half-moon and the Bloody Angle were left in possession of the Union forces. The seven days' hammering and the twenty hours of holding had won the fierce and bloody Battle of the Wilderness.
CHAPTER IX
HEROES OF GETTYSBURG
Heroes are not made of different stuff from ordinary men. God made us all heroes at heart. Satan lied when he said "all that a man hath will he give for his life." The call comes and commonplace men and workaday women give their lives as a very little thing for a cause, for an ideal, or for others. When the great moment comes, the love and courage and unselfishness that lie deep in the souls of all of us can flash forth into beacon-lights of brave deeds which will stand throughout the years pointing the path of high endeavor for those who come after.
Women the world over will never forget how Mrs. Strauss came back from the life-boat and went down on the Titanic with her husband rather than have him die alone.
Boys have been braver and tenderer their lives long because of the unknown hero at Niagara. With his mother he was trapped on a floe when the ice-jam broke. Slowly and sternly it moved toward the roaring edge of the cataract. From the Suspension Bridge a rope was let down to them. Twice he tried to fix it around his mother, but she was too old and weak to hold on. The floe was passing beyond the bridge and there was just time for him to knot the rope around himself. Young, active and strong, he would be safe in a moment, but his mother would go to death deserted and alone. He tossed the rope away, put his arm around his old mother and they went over the Falls together.
Every American sailor has been braver and gentler from the memory of Captain Craven who commanded the monitor Tecumseh when Fighting Farragut destroyed the forts and captured the Rebel fleet at Mobile Bay. The Tecumseh was about to grapple with the Tennessee, the great Rebel ram, when she struck a torpedo, turned over and went down bow foremost. Captain Craven was in the pilot-house with the pilot. As the vessel sank they both rushed for the narrow door. Craven reached it first, but stood aside saying, "After you, pilot." The latter leaped through as the water rushed in and was saved. Craven went down with his ship.
The great moments which are given to men in which to decide whether they are to be heroes or cowards may come at any time, but they always flash through every battle. Danger, suffering and death are the stern tests by which men's real selves are discovered. A man can't do much pretending when he is under fire, and he can't make believe he is brave or unselfish, or chivalric when he is sick, or wounded, or dying. We can be proud that the man who went before us made good and that we can remember all the great battles of the greatest of our wars by the brave deeds of brave men.