This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [166]
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.
Yet it was oddly inconclusive. The guns swept Cemetery Ridge with flame and with fragments of flying metal; they killed men and animals, broke gun carriages to fragments, exploded caissons. Over the heads of the waiting Confederate infantry the Federal shells ripped branches and ugly jagged splinters from trees, killed crouching men who never saw the battle, filled the air with the sound and the scent of violent death. But the great assault, when it came, would go about as it would have gone if there had been no bombardment at all. The Federal power to resist was not materially weakened — except that some of Meade’s batteries ran out of long-range ammunition and would have to wait for their attackers to get to close quarters; the Confederate power to attack was as strong as it was before the guns went off; and the power and the fury that had beaten upon the rocky hills were no more than the overture for the moment that lay just ahead.
That moment would linger and shine in the American memory forever, the terrible unforgettable moment of truth that would symbolize inexpressible things. It blotted out other scenes then, and it still does. A few miles to the east, all but unnoticed by the armies themselves, Union and Confederate cavalry were fighting a desperate mounted battle, charging lines crashing into each other at full gallop as if these troopers by themselves would win the day and the war; and if Stuart’s worn brigades had managed to break through they could have gone all across the defenseless rear of the Army of the Potomac, where they could have made vast trouble. But they did not break through; they drew off at last with heavy losses — and afterward all anyone would say was, “Oh yes, the cavalry fought at Gettysburg too, didn’t it?” And far down in Mississippi a white flag was coming out through Pemberton’s lines, and for the second time in his life Grant was being asked what terms he would give to a surrendering army; yet then and now, to look at that hour is to see it through the eyes of the sweating Federals who crouched on Cemetery Ridge and squinted west, peering toward the afternoon sun.
What they saw was an army with banners, moving out from the woods into the open field by the ranked guns, moving out of shadow into eternal legend, rank upon endless rank drawn up with parade-ground precision, battle flags tipped forward, sunlight glinting from musket barrels — General George Pickett’s Virginians, and ten thousand men from other commands, men doomed to try the impossible and to fail. It takes time to get fifteen thousand men into line, and these Southerners were deliberate about it — perhaps out of defiance, perhaps out of sheer self-consciousness and pride. Then at last they had things the way they wanted them and they went marching up toward the clump of unattainable trees, and all the guns opened again, and a great cloud of smoke and dust filled the hollow plain.
Lee watched from the crest of Seminary Ridge, and because of the smoke he could see very little. Meade saw nothing at all, for he had been busy about headquarters duties far behind the lines,