Never Call Retreat (29 page)

What came out of this on July 2 was a tremendous battle that settled nothing, except for the thousands on both sides who were shot, and possibly for their next of kin. Lee's army, the incomparable instrument for finding and exploiting weak spots, struck on this day against strong points and wore itself out. It pounded the Federal left, head-on and heads-down, in a peach orchard and a wheat field and in the craggy ravines of a tumbled rock pile known as Devil's Den, and a Confederate who watched from the steeple of the Lutheran Seminary could see little but a dense fog bank of shifting gunsmoke that hid fields and woods and fighting men; a fog bank that was forever sparkling and pulsing with the sharp red flames from the muzzles of invisible cannon, whose gunners found that this fight was even worse than Antietam itself, the battle they always remembered as Artillery Hell.
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This was one of many battles that swung up and down the long length of the Federal line, each battle desperate but each one somehow separate from the others.

The Army of Northern Virginia tried to storm Little Round Top, fought in a gloomy valley behind that hill, swept across the Emmitsburg Road to touch the crest of Cemetery Ridge, wrecking Dan Sickles' III Corps, mangling the V Corps of George Sykes, beating one division of Hancock's II Corps; and each time it came within an inch of success but had to fall back before that final inch could be gained. It took a long row of guns in the heart of the Federal position but could not hold them, and it fought once in a farm yard against massed artillery that lacked infantry support, losing at last because canister at close range could dismember foot soldiers faster than the replacements could get into action. (After the battle, men who crossed this part of the field said that war could show nothing more hideous than the human fragments that lay on the ground where infantry had been broken up by close-range artillery fire.) A division from Ewell's corps struck the Federal right on Culp's Hill, clambering up steep slopes full of young trees and fallen timber, reaching the Federal trenches, occupying parts of them, falling back down hill when the rifle fire was too heavy; hanging on in the darkness, with the sputter of musketry making flickering firefly lights in the dark woods; hanging on to renew the fight at dawn. In the evening Lee's army assaulted the sagging ridge between Culp's Hill and Cemetery Hill, broke the XI Corps line in the twilight, got into Howard's artillery, and was driven off after a furious hand-to-hand fight amid the wheels of the guns. Late at night, soldiers from the two armies went to a spring beyond the Federal right to get water, recognized one another in the shaded moonlight as enemies, and fell into a meaningless fight that went on until after midnight and did nothing but add to the casualty lists.

There was no pattern to any of this, except for the undesigned pattern that can always be traced after the event. Gettysburg was improvised, unpremeditated as a chain of lightning, searing and scarring both armies; Meade's able staff officer, G. K. Warren, summed it up when he wrote that the July 2 fight "was no display of scientific maneuver, and should never be judged like some I think vainly try to judge a battle as they would a game of chess."
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It was a test of what men can nerve themselves to attempt and what they can compel themselves to endure, and at shattering cost it proved that the possibilities in both directions are limitless; but as Warren said it was not especially instructive otherwise.

Late that night Meade met with his corps commanders in the cramped living room of the little farmhouse he used as headquarters, heard what they had to say, and reached a simple and direct conclusion: Lee would hit him once more, and this time he would hit the center of the line because he had failed on both flanks. That would be all right; the center was held by Hancock, and he and his men could be relied on if any could be relied on. Meade was content to remain on the defensive and wait for the blow to fall.
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By the morning of July 3 Lee's field of choice was fatally narrow. It contained now only two elements of importance— the strength to strike one more blow and the overwhelming compulsion to strike while that strength remained. Everything Lee had planned to do north of the Potomac had been constricted by two day of immense violence here at Gettysburg, and what was left of his plans now hinged on the fact that General George Pickett of Longstreet's corps had reached the field with a fresh division—the one Secretary Seddon considered sending off to Vicksburg before he was warned about the danger of having to choose between Mississippi and Virginia. Pickett and his 5000 good soldiers were here to be used, and when Longstreet again proposed a maneuver around the Federal left Lee refused to hear him. He would strengthen Pickett with such brigades as were available to form a storming column that would hit the Yankees where they were toughest, right at the northern end of Cemetery Ridge, going uphill all the way to get at the crack combat corps of the Army of the Potomac in a prepared position of great strength. This final desperate stroke would be based on the faith that when the Army of Northern Virginia made its supreme effort it could not be stopped by anybody.
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The day began badly. Ewell's men had not finished their attack on Culp's Hill, and Confederate chances would obviously be improved if this attack could be renewed when Pickett's column was hitting the Federal center. But Ewell's men had spent the night on the slopes of the hill in close contact with the Federal trenches, and as soon as daylight came the fighting there flared up automatically. Meade had reinforced this position during the night, the Federals counterattacked, and after several hours of hard fighting the Confederates sullenly withdrew. By eleven o'clock they were back down on the plain below the hill, fought out, weaker by 1800 casualties. Long before the attack on the center could be made, the Federal right was out of danger.

So there was only one card left to play, and it was played so magnificently that it is not always easy to see that it probably was a losing card all along.

Lee's blow was going to be formidable, beyond question. He was putting between 10,000 and 15,000 men into this attack: Pickett's division, joined by two of Hill's divisions, Heth's and William Dorsey Pender's. (Both Heth and Pender had been wounded; Heth's division today was led by Brigadier General J. Johnston Pettigrew, Pender's by Major General Issac R. Trimble.) To prepare the way, Lee had assembled an immense rank of guns, 130 of them or more, planted almost hub to hub west of the Emmitsburg Road. These guns would pound the Yankee line with the heaviest bombardment ever seen in North America, and after they had softened it the infantry would charge. Longstreet would have additional infantry ready to go up and support the right flank of the column of assault in case of need.

But the odds were forbidding. Meade's best general, Hancock, would receive the attack, and he had more than 9000 veterans in line, fighters as good as any in either army, protected by stone walls, piled fence rails and sketchy but effective breastworks, backed by plenty of the superb Federal artillery. His men had a clear field of fire; their assailants would have to climb the slanting fields for more than half a mile without the slightest protection. Hancock's position actually was almost as strong as the famous Confederate position along Marye's Heights at Fredericksburg, where Burnside had almost ruined his army trying to do the impossible. In addition, Meade had an abundance of reserves close at hand —Sedgwick's entire army corps, rested now from its hard march, hardly used at all so far in this battle. Years afterward, Longstreet said that before the charge he pointed to the Federal position and warned Lee that "no fifteen thousand men ever arrayed for battle can take that position,"
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and whether he actually said it or just thought later that he should have said it, his appraisal stands. The thing could not be done.

But the way it was tried still commands attention. Somewhere around the middle of the day the noise of battle died and there was a queer, nerve-testing silence. On the far slope of Cemetery Ridge, Meade and some of his officers sat in an open field and had lunch, and Meade got off a quick note to Halleck, carefully timing it at 12:30 P.M.: "At the present moment all is quiet." Hancock's men crouched behind their barricades under the blistering July sun and peered to the west; they could see the concealing woods on the rising skyline, the ominous array of guns in front of the woods, wisps of smoke from a burning barn off to the right drifting down the breeze, nothing else moving anywhere. Hidden behind the trees, the Confederates who were going tc make the charge formed their long ranks and lay down tc sweat it out, knowing what was ahead of them. At last, from a fence corner at the edge of the woods, Longstreet wrote a note and gave it to a courier, the courier cantered out to the guns and gave the note to Colonel J. B. Walton, Long-street's chief of artillery, two shots were fired as a signal, the sharp reports echoing far across the silent fields—and then the bank of guns exploded in a sudden, enormous blast ol fire, driving a blizzard of bursting shell and solid shot at the rocky crest of the ridge and piling up a billow of smoke ir the hollow ground west of the Emmitsburg Road. The final stage of the Battle of Gettysburg had begun.
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No one in either army had ever lived through anything like this bombardment. The weight of sound was obliterating, $ roar as unbroken as sustained musketry-fire but infinitely louder; Hancock's artillery was firing in reply to the Confederate fire, in one square mile more than two hundred guns were in action, each one getting off two or three rounds £ minute, and the racket was so prodigious that some of the gunners said afterward they could hardly hear the reports of the cannon they themselves were firing. It went on and on— half an hour, an hour, no one really knew how long—and the waiting infantry hugged the ground, each man trying to make himself as small as possible. On Cemetery Ridge the ground was rocky, and the projectiles broke the rocks and drove deadly jagged fragments into prostrate bodies; in the woods to the west waiting Confederates were killed by chunks and branches from the broken trees. One of Pickett's brigadiers, General Lewis Armistead, picked up a splinter, showed it to his men, and asked casually: "Boys, do you think you can go up under that? It is pretty hot out there." Now and then a shell would find an artillery caisson and blow it up, with a spurt of flame and black smoke. Once, during the worst of it, Hancock rode slowly from end to end of his line, risking his life to make his men feel that the danger was not quite as bad as it seemed to be. John Gibbon, commanding Hancock's second division, strolled out in front of the Federal line with the same purpose and found himself safer there than he would have been farther to the rear; the Confederate fire was corning in a bit too high.
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At three o'clock or a little later the bombardment tapered off, ceased altogether, and a tense silence descended on the smoking field. Then out of the woods came General Lee's assaulting column, like actors in some unimaginable drama coming at last onto the stage—rank after rank, Pickett and Pettigrew and Trimble and their divisions and when they got into the open the men halted and dressed their ranks as carefully as if they were going on parade. They were worth looking at. Their line was a mile wide from flank to flank, Pickett's division on the right, Pettigrew's beside it, Trimble's in close support, general officers mounted, battle flags overhead, sunlight glinting off of the rifle barrels. They perfected their alignment, finally, and when the line began to roll forward it looked irresistible.

It was not irresistible. In point of fact it was doomed. Up on the ridge the Federal gunners were waiting and they had a perfect target—massed infantry, wide and deep, wholly unprotected, coming closer and closer, fearfully and fatally vulnerable. The gunners held their fire briefly. In the center of Hancock's line long-range ammunition had been exhausted, and some of the batteries had been all but wrecked during the bombardment, but off to the right and left all of the guns were ready and when they opened fire they tore frightful gaps in the Confederate line. Pettigrew's division, which had taken heavy losses in the first day's fight, got it first, and worst, and as the ranks went up the slope they disappeared in a rolling cloud of dust and smoke; the gunners kept firing into the heart of the cloud until at last this division could stand no more. It began to give way, hundreds of men shol down, others drifting toward the rear; and Longstreet, watching from afar with dour expectation of disaster, saw its lines crumbling and told British Colonel Fremantle, who was standing beside him, that the attack was going to be a failure.
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On Pickett's right things were no better. Hancock swung a brigade out into the open to deliver a punishing flanking fire, the guns on the Federal left were pounding hard, and the great attacking wave contracted, both flanks beaten in. the men who kept going crowding in toward the center. They crossed the Emmitsburg Road, went on up the last of the rising ground, and at last reached musket range and canister range and got to grips with their foes. Incredibly, a few hundred broke through the Federal line, clambering over the stone wall and getting in among the artillery, Axmistead in the lead, Federal regiments running in to meet them. From his post by the western woods Lee could see little more thai a swirling fog of smoke, with tossing red battle flags briefij visible here and there. One of Longstreet's brigades tried to advance to support Pickett's right, lost sight of its objective; stumbled into a terrible fire from massed artillery, and came back in fragments. Armistead died with his hand on a Federal cannon, the men who had crossed the wall with him died or were captured . . . and suddenly it was all over, and when the blinding smoke drifted away what was left of the mighty column of assault was going back to the Confederate fines. Of the men who had made the advance, just about half returned. The Battle of Gettysburg had ended.
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