and death
with silent glory. From every nook and corner, from every shadow and
across every open space, through the hot breath of the night, came the
moans of thousands, and louder than all the long agonizing cries for
water. Many a man in grey crawled over the ragged rocks to press his
canteen to the lips of his dying enemy in blue, and many a boy in blue
did as much for the man in grey.

Fifteen thousand wounded men lay there through the long black hours.

At ten o'clock a wounded Christian soldier began to sing one of the old,
sweet hymns of faith, whose words have come ringing down the ages wet
with tears and winged with human hopes. In five minutes ten thousand
voices of blue and grey, some of them quivering with the agony of death,
had joined. For two hours the woods and hills rang with the songs of
these wounded men.

All through this pitiful music the Confederates were massing their
artillery on Seminary Ridge, replacing their wounded horses and
refilling their ammunition chests.

The Union army were burrowing like moles and planting their terrible
batteries on the brows of the hills beyond the town.

At Lee's council of war that night Longstreet advised his withdrawal
from Gettysburg into a more favorable position in the mountains. But the
Confederate Commander, reinforced now by the arrival of Pickett's
division of fifteen thousand men and Stuart's cavalry, determined to
renew the battle.

At the first grey streak of dawn on the 3rd the Federal guns roared
their challenge to the Confederate forces which had captured their
entrenchments on Culp's Hill. Seven terrible hours of bombardment,
charge and counter charge followed until every foot of space had claimed
its toll of dead, before the Confederates yielded the Hill.

At noon there was an ominous lull in the battle. At one o'clock a puff
of smoke from Seminary Ridge was followed by a dull roar. The signal gun
had pealed its call of death to thousands. For two miles along the crest
of this Ridge the Confederates had planted one hundred and fifty guns.
Two miles of smoke-wreathed flame suddenly leaped from those hills in a
single fiery breath.

The longer line of big Federal guns on Seminary Ridge were silent for a
few minutes and then answered gun for gun until the heavens were
transformed into a roaring hell of bursting, screaming, flaming shells.
For two hours the earth trembled beneath the shock of these volcanoes,
and then the two storms died sl