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.

For two hours that terrible cannonading was maintained. The men who
served the guns looked like stokers of ships, for, such was the heat,
many of them, casting away first one piece of clothing and then another,
were half naked, and black sweat glistened in streams on their chests
and backs. As sight-seers crowd in eagerly by one door of a building
where there is an exhibition, and come reluctantly out by another and go
their ways, so the reserves kept pressing to the front, and the wounded
maintained an unceasing reluctant stream to the rear.

A little before three o'clock Hannibal St. John had his right knee
smashed by t