This Hallowed Ground (46 page)

Stolid General John Buford, who commanded the cavalry, put his dismounted troopers in line, unlimbered his artillery, sent riders pelting south to notify Meade that the Rebels had been found, and opened fire. And from the moment when cavalry and infantry began to exchange long-range shots — firing tentatively, as if they were probing this embryonic battle to see what it might amount to — the two armies were committed to their most terrible fight.

Gettysburg was an act of fate; a three-day explosion of storm and flame and terror, unplanned and uncontrollable, coming inevitably (as the war itself had come) out of the things that hard-pressed men had done in the light of imperfect knowledge, the end result of actions that moved with an inexorable logic toward a fundamental and astounding goal. It would come to symbolize all the war, as if the blunders and the heroism, the hopes and the delusions, the combativeness and the incomprehensible devotion of all Americans had been summed up once and for all in one monstrous act of violence. It was enormously destructive, its significance was not seen until long after it had ended, and — to make it finally and perfectly characteristic — it opened and closed with moments of heartbreaking drama.

Buford’s cavalry had to hold the ridge until some of Meade’s infantry could come up. The Confederates got an infantry division in line and began to move forward, and ragged smoke clouds hung over the ridge as the firing grew heavier; then, in the middle of the morning, the leading brigade of General John Reynolds’s I Army Corps came swinging up the Emmitsburg road from the south, Reynolds himself galloping on ahead to see Buford and get a line on the fight. As the Federals came nearer they left the road and headed cross-lots, taking a short cut to the scene of action; and some impulse made the commander of this leading brigade shake out the battle flags and put the fife and drum corps at the head of the column to play the men into battle. On they came, five regiments of lean Middle Westerners, roar
of battle just ahead, shrill fifes playing “The Campbells Are Coming,” eighteen hundred veteran soldiers tramping along in step.
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This battle of Gettysburg would begin with a flourish and a snatch of music, with the shock troops giving a last salute to the fraudulent romance of war before plunging into the storm. Then the music ended, the infantry ran out along the ridge, and the fight was on.

This day began well for the Federals, but it ended disastrously. Reynolds’s men knocked the first Confederate attack back on its heels, capturing a Rebel brigadier and mangling a couple of Confederate brigades almost beyond repair; but Confederate reinforcements were reaching Gettysburg faster than the Federals, and the battle lines grew and grew until they formed a great semicircle west and north of the town, Federals outnumbered and outflanked, Reynolds killed and his army corps cut to pieces. Another Yankee corps, the XI, came up and went through town on the double, colliding head on with Confederates who were marching south from Carlisle. These Confederates cut around both flanks of the XI Corps’ line, crumpled them, punched holes in the line, and late in the afternoon drove the survivors back through the village in rout; then the line west of town caved in, and by evening the Federals who were left (they had had upward of ten thousand casualties) were reassembling on the high ground south and east of Gettysburg, grimly determined to hold on until the rest of the army came up, but not at all certain that they could do it.

Perhaps Lee could have driven them off that evening and clinched things. Most of his army was on the scene by now, and the Federals were badly outnumbered; one final drive in the Stonewall Jackson manner might have done it. But Lee was fighting blind. The cavalry that might have told him where all of Meade’s men were was still absent, an exhausted column riding hard somewhere off to the east, and Jackson was in his grave, and by the time the southern generals had conferred and considered and weighed risks, night had come and it was too late. The battle would have to be resumed next day.

July 2 came in hot after a windless night in which a full moon lit the dreadful debris on the fields and hills where men had fought on the first day. Meade was on the scene now, most of his army in hand and the rest coming up fast. He held good ground: Cemetery Hill, a massive height on the southern edge of town, wooded Culp’s Hill half a mile to the east, and the long crest of a ridge that ran south from the cemetery, taking its name from it — Cemetery Ridge — which ended in two rocky knolls a mile or more away, Little Round Top and Big Round Top. On these heights the Army of the Potomac waited while Lee prepared for a new assault.

Running parallel to Cemetery Ridge, a mile west across a shallow
open valley, was a similar rise in the ground, Seminary Ridge, taking its name from a Lutheran theological institute. On this ridge, looking east, was perhaps half of the Confederate army. The rest of the army was in position in and on both sides of Gettysburg, facing south — an awkward position, since it compelled the smaller of the two armies to occupy the longer line and gave Meade the advantage of a compact central position; wherever they made their fight, the Confederates would have to come uphill.

One Confederate did not like the looks of it at all. James Longstreet was a stubborn, opinionated man, and on July 2 his opinion was that Gettysburg was not a fit place for the Confederates to fight — an opinion that he clung to with massive stubbornness. Better, he argued, to maneuver, sliding far around the Union flank and finding some position in which the Army of Northern Virginia could sit tight and let the Yankees do the attacking. But Lee looked east from Seminary Ridge, saw the ranks of the waiting Federals, and made the inescapable decision: The enemy is there, and there I will attack him. Longstreet argued, grumbled, and sulked, but it made no difference. Here the fight had started and here it would have to end.

It was well on in the afternoon before the Confederates could make their attack; and this second day at Gettysburg was made up of many separate fights, each one a moment or an hour of concentrated fury, with a blinding, choking fog of blue powder smoke over the hillsides and the rocky woods, hammered down by unending deafening noise, sparkling and glowing evilly with constant spurts of fire. In the batteries the slim iron rifles and the squat brass smoothbores bounded backward at each discharge, their trail-pieces tearing the ground; sweating gunners manhandled them back into place, rammed home fresh charges, stood aside for a new salvo, and then ran in to lay hold of wheels and handspikes to make ready for another blast. Above all the racket there was the sound of men cheering and cursing and the fearful screaming of wounded horses, and all the ground was covered with dead and wounded. Ragged lines of infantry swayed in and out of the shifting veils of smoke, battle flags visible here and there, generals riding, gesturing with swords, couriers going in on the gallop with orders that might or might not be heeded. Commanding officers sent troops forward, called up reinforcements, peered anxiously through their glasses at the murk that hid the battle from their sight. They had called this violence into being but they could do no more with it. This was the soldiers’ fight now.

East of Gettysburg there was Culp’s Hill, high and covered with trees, anchor of the right end of Meade’s bent line. Confederate Richard Ewell sent his men in, long battle lines forming in the flat ground and
running forward into the woods. They found the Federals posted in solid breastworks of earth and felled trees; they struggled up the smoke-drenched hillside, stumbled back down, tried again, won a foothold that threatened the Union army with disaster — and could not quite make it, while the chain lightning of the flashing guns laced in and out among the tree trunks and sparkled in the hot woodland dusk.

South of Gettysburg there was high ground along the Emmitsburg road, and here, against Meade’s orders, General Dan Sickles had posted the III Army Corps. Longstreet drove his own army corps in on these men amid an immense bombardment, a cannon ball took off Sickles’s leg, and the III Corps was broken up and driven back in confusion, although it made a bitter fight of it before retreating. There was a peach orchard, where men fought hand to hand with bayonets and musket butts amid little trees shattered by shell fire. There was a wheat field, grain trampled flat and strewn with dead bodies, where Northerners and Southerners knelt thirty paces apart and blazed away with unremitting fury; the Federals lost the field, brought up reinforcements and regained it, then lost it for good when a new Confederate attack was driven home. Near the wheat field there was a great tangled area of boulders and stunted trees known as the Devil’s Den; it earned its name that afternoon, while men fired from behind rocks and trees, wounded men dragged themselves into rocky dens and crevices for shelter, and Yankee batteries in the rear blasted the place indiscriminately with shell and solid shot. East of Devil’s Den there was Little Round Top, swept by southern rifle fire, defended by last-minute Federal reinforcements who ran panting along the uneven hillside to drive back the Confederates who had swept through Devil’s Den.

Sickles’s line was pulverized, and fresh troops who came in were broken and driven back, and for a time there was a great gaping hole all along the left of Meade’s line. But Little Round Top held, and a line of Federal guns was posted in a farmyard, where it held off Longstreet’s charging men until Meade could get fresh infantry on the scene. At one time a Confederate division charged all the way to the crest of Cemetery Ridge, and the Army of the Potomac was in danger of being broken in half; but the invaders could not stay, a series of disorganized but effective countercharges cut them and drove them back, and when darkness came at last the Union left continued to hold the high ground. Over near Culp’s Hill there was a final flare-up, and once again disaster came near; charging Southerners broke an infantry line and got in among the Yankee guns on Cemetery Hill, but a Union brigade ran in at the last moment, fighting in pitch-darkness with only the spitting fire from gun muzzles to tell where the battle line was, and the Southerners drew off at last and retired to the plain north of the
hill. The second day at Gettysburg came to a close, and as the guns were stilled a constant, agonizing chorus of cries from the helpless wounded men filled the moonlit night; thousands upon thousands of maimed lay in field and woods and on the rocky knolls, all the way from Round Top and the wheat field around to Culp’s Hill.

In the rear of the Army of the Potomac there was a great confused huddle of bewildered fugitives, walking wounded, wrecked artillery units, and panicky non-combat details. During the night and early morning the last of Meade’s reinforcements came up through this backwash. A gunner in the VI Corps remembered how the stragglers and wounded men told doleful tales of defeat — “there was all kinds of stories flying round in the rear, some telling us that we were whipped to death and that any God’s quantity of our artillery was captured”; but when the replacements got to the battle line they found everybody confident. A wounded infantry colonel assured them that “we are just warming them and giving them the damndest whipping they ever got,”
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and when daylight brought a renewal of the Confederate attempt to seize Culp’s Hill the Federals steadied and beat the attack off with smooth competence.

After the fight for Culp’s Hill ended, there was a lull, and the hot noon hours of the third day passed with nothing to break the stillness but an occasional sputter of skirmish-line fire. The thing had not been settled yet. The armies had not quite fought themselves out; the Army of Northern Virginia had enough strength left for one final assault, and the Army of the Potomac was still strong enough for one more desperate stand. It would happen now. Everybody knew it, and the armies waited, tense, while the sun beat down on the steaming fields.

While they waited, there was a restless stir of movement along the center and left of the Confederate line. Rank upon rank of artillery took position in the open, west of Emmitsburg road; behind, in the woods along Seminary Ridge, troops were on the move, glint of sunlight on rifle barrels visible now and then to the waiting Federals a mile to the east. Meade had predicted the night before that if Lee attacked again he would hit the Union center: he had tried both flanks and had failed; only the middle line was left. Meade was right. Lee was massing strength for one last great blow, aiming it at the strongest part of the Union line, where the chance of success was little better than Burnside’s chance had been in front of the stone wall at Fredericksburg. Lee was used to long odds, he had the habit of success, and there was in him a deep confidence that his men could do anything if they were once properly thrown into action. The point they would strike was marked by a little clump of trees — center of the target for Lee’s final shot.

He would throw them into action here and now, in spite of the odds, trusting that the valor of an infantry which he believed to be unconquerable would make up for all of the mistakes that had been made. A courier rode out from Longstreet’s headquarters with an order for a battery commander; two guns were fired with a breathless, measured interval between — and then, at one o’clock, came the explosion, and the whole line of Confederate guns opened in a thunderous bombardment. Federal gunners on Cemetery Ridge ran to their pieces to reply, Yankee infantry huddled behind low breastworks, dazed by the storm, and the fifteen thousand Southerners who had been appointed to charge across the valley knelt in the woods behind their flaming guns and waited likewise, while the ground trembled and a great smoke-fog filled the open space between the ridges, and the war’s supreme hour of tension tightened toward its breaking point.

It was the most prodigious bombardment of the war. The roar was continuous, so intense that artillerists could hardly hear the reports of their own guns; men who thought they had seen and heard the ultimate at Antietam or Gaines’s Mill found that this went beyond anything they had known or imagined. It was the utmost the two armies could do.