rific fighting passed; the afternoon of the
third day arrives and the final charge is made upon the division
commanded by Hancock.

About one o'clock one hundred and fifty-five guns suddenly opened on
that one division. For two hours the air was fairly alive with shells.
Every size and form of shell known to British or American gunnery
shrieked, whirled, moaned, whistled and wrathfully fluttered over the
ground, says Wilkinson. "As many as six in a second, constantly two in a
second came screaming around the headquarters. They burst in the yard;
burst next to the fence where the horses belonging to the aids and
orderlies were hitched. The fastened animals reared and plunged with
terror. One horse fell, then another; sixteen lay dead before the
cannonade ceased. Through the midst of the storm of screaming and
exploding shells an ambulance driven at full speed by its frenzied
conductor presented the marvelous spectacle of a horse going rapidly on
three legs, a hind one had been shot off at the hock. A shell tore up
the little step at the headquarters cottage and ripped bags of oats as
with a knife. Another shell soon carried off one of its two pillars.
Soon a spherical case burst opposite the open door, another tore through
the low garret, the remaining pillar went almost immediately to the howl
of a fixed shot that Whitworth must have made. Soldiers in Federal blue
were torn to pieces in the road and died with the peculiar yell that
blends the extorted cry of pain with horror and despair."

"The Union guns," says Barnes, "replied for a time, and were then
withdrawn to cool." Probably the experience of the veteran troops knew
that they would soon be needed for closer work. The men lay crouching
behind rocks and hiding in hollows, from the iron tempest which drove
over the hill, anxiously awaiting the charge, which experience taught
them, must follow. Finally the cannonade lulled, the supreme minute had
come, and out of the woods swept the Confederate double battle-line,
over a mile long, preceded by a cloud of skirmishers, and with wings on
either side to prevent its being flanked. This was Lee's first charge,
and upon it depended, as subsequently seen, the rise or fall of the
Confederate cause.

A quarter of a mile away, and a hundred guns tore great gaps in the
line, but the men closed up and sternly moved on. A thrill of admiration
ran along the Union ranks as silently and with disciplined steadiness,
that magnifice