I walked down the line of Company A. Peacock was lying dead with his hat over his face.  The wounded—­those disabled—­were unrelieved.  The men were prostrate in their pits, powder-stained, haggard, battle-worn, and stern.  Still shrieked the shells overhead, and yet roared the guns to front and rear—­a pandemonium of sight and sound reserved from the foundation of the world for the valley of Gettysburg.  The bleeding sun went out in smoke.  The smell of burning powder filled the land.  Before us and behind us bursting caissons added to the hellish magnificence of this awful picture,—­in its background a school of theology, and in its foreground the peaceful city of the dead.

For more than an hour the hundreds of hostile guns shook earth and sky; then there was silence and stillness.  But the stillness was but brief.  Out from our rear and right now marched the Confederate infantry on to destruction.

We of the skirmishers felt that our line was doomed.  I saw men stand, regardless of exposure, and curse the day.  For more than eighteen hours we had been near the Federal lines.  We had no hope.  We knew that our line, marching out for attack, could not even reach the enemy.  Before it could come within charging distance it would be beaten to pieces by artillery.  The men looked at the advancing line and said one to another, “Lee has made a mistake.”

The line came on.  It was descending the slope of Seminary Ridge.

The Federal batteries began to work upon the line.  Into the valley and up the hill it came, with all the cannon in our front and right,—­and far to the right,—­pumping death into its ranks.

I gave it up.  I thought of Captain Haskell, and of his words concerning General Lee’s inclination to attack.  I was no military man; I knew nothing of scientific war, but I was sure that time had knelled the doom of our poor line—­condemned to attack behind stone fences the flower of the Army of the Potomac protected by two hundred guns.  It was simply insane.  It was not war, neither was it magnificent; it was too absurd to be grand.

Great gaps were made in the line.  It came on and passed over the skirmishers.  The left of the line passed over us just beyond the spot where Rhodes lay dead.  I could see down our line.  It was already in tatters.  Writers of the South and of the North have all described Pickett’s charge as gallant, and have said that his line came on like troops on dress-parade.  It was gallant enough—­too gallant; but there was no dress-parade.  Our officers and men on Seminary Ridge were looking at Pickett’s division from its rear; the blue men were looking upon it from its front; from neither position could the alignment be seen; to them it looked straight and fine; but that line passed by me so that I looked along it, and I know that it was swayed and bent long before it fired a shot.  As it passed over us, it was scattered—­many men thirty, forty, even fifty yards in front of other men.