Aladdin held a field-glass to his eyes with trembling hands, and watched the cruel mowing of the blue flowers.  Sometimes he recognized a man that he knew, and saw him die for his country.  Three times he saw John St. John in the forefront of the battle.  The first time he was riding a glorious black horse, of spirit and proportions to correspond with those of the hero himself.  The second time he was on foot, running forward with a-halt in his stride, hatless, and carrying a great battle-flag.  Upon the top of it gleamed a gold eagle, that nodded toward the enemy.  A dozen blue-coated soldiers, straggling like the finishers in a long-distance race, followed him with bayonets fixed.  The little loose knot of men ran across a field toward a stone wall that bounded it upon the other side.  Then white smoke burst from the wall, and they were cut down to the last man.  The smoke cleared, and Aladdin saw John lying above the great flag which he had carried.  A figure in gray leaped the stone wall and ran out to him, stooped, and seizing the staff of the flag in both hands, braced his hands and endeavored to draw it from beneath the great body of the hero.  But it would not come, and as he bent closer to obtain a better hold, the back of a great clenched hand struck him across the jaw, and he fell like a log.  Other men in gray leaped the wall and ran out.  The flag came easily now, for St. John was dead; but so was the gray brother, for his comrades raised him, and his head hung back over his left shoulder, and they saw that his neck had been broken like a dry stick.

Aladdin had not been sent to that place to mourn, but to gain information.  Twice and three times he wiped his eyes clear of tears, and then he swept his faltering glass along the lines of the enemy, until, ranged in their center, he beheld a great semicircle of a hundred and more iron and brass cannons, and movements of troops.  Then Aladdin scrambled down from Little Round Top to report what he had seen in the center of the Confederate lines.

At one o’clock the Confederate batteries, one hundred and fifteen pieces in all, opened their tremendous fire upon the center of the Union lines.  Eighty cannons roared back at them with defiant thunder, and the blue sky became hidden by smoke.  Among the Union batteries horses began to run loose, cannons to be splintered like fire-wood, and caissons to explode.  At these moments men, horses, fragments of men and horses, stones, earth, and things living and things dead were hurled high into the air with great blasts of flame and smoke, and it was possible to hear miles of exultant yells from the hills opposite.  But fresh cannon were brought lumbering up at the gallop and rolled into the places of those dismantled, shot and shell and canister and powder were rushed forward from the reserve, and the grim, silent infantry, the great lumbermen of Maine and Vermont, the shrill-voiced regiments from New York, the shrewd farmers of Ohio and Massachusetts, the deliberate Pennsylvanians, and the rest, lay closely, wherever there was shelter, and moistened their lips, and gripped their rifles, and waited—­waited.