Hancock," he said to Lieutenant Mitchell, Hancock's
aide-de-camp, to whom he handed his watch, "that I know I did my
country a great wrong when I took up arms against her, for which I am
sorry, but for which I cannot live to atone." Four thousand, not
wounded, are prisoners of war. More in number of the captured than the
captors. Our men are still "gathering them in." Some hold up their hands
or a handkerchief in sign of submission; some have hugged the ground to
escape our bullets and so are taken; few made resistance after the first
moment of our crossing the wall; some yield submissively with good
grace, some with grim, dogged aspect, showing that but for the other
alternative they could not submit to this. Colonels, and all less grades
of officers, in the usual proportion are among them, and all are being
stripped of their arms. Such of them as escaped wounds and capture are
fleeing routed and panic stricken, and disappearing in the woods. Small
arms, more thousands than we can count, are in our hands, scattered over
the field. And these defiant battle-flags, some inscribed with "First
Manassas," the numerous battles of the Peninsula, "Second Manassas,"
"South Mountain," "Sharpsburg," (our Antietam), "Fredericksburg,"
"Chancellorsville," and many more names, our men have, and are showing
about, _over thirty of them_.

Such was really the closing scene of the grand drama of Gettysburg.
After repeated assaults upon the right and the left, where, and in all
of which repulse had been his only success, this persistent and
presuming enemy forms his chosen troops, the flower of his army, for a
grand assault upon our center. The manner and result of such assault
have been told--a loss to the enemy of from twelve thousand to fourteen
thousand, killed, wounded and prisoners, and of over thirty
battle-flags. This was accomplished by not over six thousand men, with a
loss on our part of not over two thousand five hundred killed and
wounded.

Would to Heaven General Hancock and Gibbon could have stood there where
I did, and have looked upon that field! It would have done two men, to
whom the country owes much, good to have been with their men in that
moment of victory--to have seen the result of those dispositions which
they had made, and of that splendid fighting which men schooled by their
discipline, had executed. But they are both severely wounded and have
been carried from the field. One person did come then that I was gla