now to the Confederate leaders that the Union batteries had
been silenced, and that the time had come for Pickett, the Ney of the
South, to go forward with all his forces. Only Longstreet demurred and
protested against the charge. When Pickett asked him for the order to
advance he turned away his head sorrowfully and would not speak. Then
Pickett, that great leader of men, who was one half daring and one half
magnetism and all hero, said proudly: "I shall go forward, sir." And
turned to his lovers.

Silence and smoke hung over Gettysburg.

Presently out of the smoke on the Confederate side came three lines of
gray a mile long. Battle-flags nodded at intervals, and swords blazed in
the sun.

Very deliberately and with pains about aiming, the Union batteries began
to hurl solid shot against the gray advance. Soon holes were bitten here
and there, and occasionally a flag went down, to be instantly snatched
up and waved defiantly. When Pickett, Pettigrew, and the splendid
brigade of Cadmus Wilcox had reached the bottom of the valley, their
organization was as unbroken as a parade. But there shell, instead of
round shot, met them, and men tasted death by fives and tens. But the
lines, drawing together, closed the spaces left by mortality, and the
flags began to approach each other. Then the gray men began to come
up the slope, and there were thousands of them. But shell yielded to
canister, and the muskets of the infantry sent out death in leaden
showers, so that the great charge began to melt like wax over heat, and
the flags hung close together like a trophy of battle in a chapel. But
still the gray men came. And now, in a storm of flame and smoke, they
reached the foremost cannons of the Union line, and planted their flags.
So much were they permitted for the glory of a lost cause. For a little,
men killed one another with the butts of guns, with bayonets, and with
stones, and then, as the overdrip of a wave broken upon an iron coast
trickles back through the stones of the beach to the ocean, so all
that was left of Pickett's great charge trickled back down the slope,
driblets of gray, running blood. For a little while longer the firing
continued. Battle-flags were gathered, and thrown together in sheaves.
There was a little broken cheering, and to all intents and purposes the
great war was at an end.

Aladdin, broken with grief and fatigue, went picking his way among the
dead and wounded. He had lost Peter and Hannib