ng to trouble Meade's
left, and, had Meade been successfully flanked and forced back, he would
have retired to Pipe Creek and been stronger than ever.

Of course, Pickett should never have been sent forward alone. You could
wade the Atlantic as easily as he, unsupported, could go beyond that
stone wall. But, from all one can learn, Lee was in fact not responsible
for Pickett's lack of support, although in almost guilty nobleness of
spirit he assumed the responsibility, and silently rested under the
imputation of it till his death.

Had Lee's great subordinates, Ewell at nightfall on the first day, and
Longstreet on the other two days, seconded him with the alacrity and
devotion usually displayed by them, or had Stonewall Jackson been still
alive and in the place of either of these generals, the issue of the
battle would almost to a certainty have been very different from what it
was. A soldier who had often followed to victory the enterprising Graham
of Claverhouse, but, under a weaker leader, saw a battle wavering, cried
out, "O for one hour of Dundee!" So must Lee often have sighed for
Stonewall, the loss of whom at Chancellorsville made that, for the
Confederacy, a sort of Pyrrhic victory.

Lee's skill at Gettysburg has been questioned in that he fought his army
upon the longer line, the big fishhook described by his position lying
outside the little one formed by the Federal army. But Lee fought on the
outer line also at Second Bull Run, winning one of the neatest victories
in modern warfare.

John Codman Ropes, the well-known military critic, says of this battle:
"It would be hard to find a better instance of that masterly
comprehension of the actual condition of things which marks a great
general than was exhibited in General Lee's allowing our formidable
attack, in which more than half the Federal army was taking part, to be
fully developed and to burst upon the exhausted troops of Stonewall
Jackson, while Lee, relying upon the ability of that able soldier to
maintain his position, was maturing and arranging for the great attack
on our left flank by the powerful corps of Longstreet."

In Prussia's war with Austria in 1866, Von Moltke's plan at the battle
of Sadowa, where he splendidly triumphed, was in the same respect a
close imitation of Lee's at Gettysburg. The Prussians occupied the outer
fish-hook line, the Austrians the inner. When the pickets closed in the
morning Von Moltke saluted King William and s