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the woods across from them. “From our position the eye ranged over a wide expanse of uneven country, fields broken by woods, showing nowhere any signs of an army movement, much less of conflict,” Charles Francis Adams, Jr., wrote in his memoirs. Even at the height of the battle, Gettysburg seemed pleasingly pastoral: “a quiet, midsummer, and champagne country. Neither our lines nor those of the enemy were visible to us; and the sounds of battle were hushed.” When the Confederate artillery fire began, Charles Francis Jr. and the survivors of the 1st Massachusetts Cavalry had been lying on the grass, near their horses, while they waited for orders. The thick heat and soft buzzing of insects acted as a kind of soporific. “Lulled by the incessant roar of the cannon,” he recorded, “while the fate of the army and the nation trembled in the balance, at the very crisis of the great conflict, I dropped quietly asleep. It was not heroic; but it was … war.”26

Forty-seven Confederate regiments spaced over the distance of a mile began advancing across the 1,400-yard field that lay in front of Cemetery Ridge. Francis Lawley—too ill to climb the tree himself—shouted up to Justus Scheibert to describe the charge to him. The Prussian started a running commentary full of technical descriptions, prompting Lawley to bellow at him in frustration to use layman’s terms, but Scheibert was at a loss for further words, having never witnessed such butchery. The closer the Confederates stumbled toward the concave Federal line, the easier targets they presented. Fremantle entered the wood where Pickett’s division had gathered only a few minutes before. Federal shells were bringing down huge tree limbs, and yet the wood was full of gray-clad soldiers, “in numbers as great as the crowd in Oxford Street in the middle of the day.” Then he saw that every single one was wounded.27

The woodland scene confused Fremantle. When he found Longstreet, who was sitting on a rail at the edge of the wood, he made an exceptionally thoughtless comment. “Thinking I was just in time to see the attack,” he wrote contritely, “I remarked to the General that ‘I wouldn’t have missed this for any thing.’ ” Longstreet gave a hollow laugh. “The Devil you wouldn’t! I would like to have missed it very much; we’ve attacked and been repulsed; look there!”28 Longstreet asked wearily for a drink, and Fremantle offered him a sip of rum from his flask. Scattered in heaps and fragments below were nearly seven thousand Confederate soldiers. George Pickett had lost two-thirds of his division, including all thirteen colonels. “I suppose that I was the first man to whom Pickett spoke when he reached the line,” wrote Francis Dawson. “With tears in his eyes, he said to me: ‘Why did you not halt my men here? Great God, where, oh! where is my division?’ I told him that he saw around him what there was left of it.”29

Fremantle was surprised by Longstreet’s calm demeanor. A Federal charge at this moment would have smashed the Confederate army into pieces. When one general protested that he could not gather his men, Longstreet sarcastically told him not to worry, the enemy would do it for him. Lee came riding up the hill to help rally the soldiers. “His face, which is always placid and cheerful, did not show signs of the slightest disappointment,” wrote Fremantle. His only concern was to ready a line of defense. Lee asked Colonel Edward Alexander whether they had enough ammunition to repel a Federal attack. The artillerist gave a bleak answer. Lee bravely acknowledged his part in the failed charge. “It was all my fault this time,” Lee told the dazed fugitives from Pickett’s charge; “form your ranks again when you get back to cover.”30 At 7:30 P.M., when he was certain that there would be no more fighting that day, Fremantle returned to camp to describe the recent events to Lawley.

On the following day, July 4, the battlefield was soaked by a long, steady downpour. “Many dear friends had yielded up their young lives during the hours which had elapsed,” wrote Charles Francis Jr., “but, though twenty