And the
answer came: No; I am fighting for life and liberty; I hate nobody. I
fired, and saw the man no more.

Our men far to the right retook the barn. Again the enemy recovered it.

Cartridges were running low. Some brave men ran back to the line of
battle for more cartridges. The skirmishing was incessant. Our losses
were serious. We had fought constantly from sunrise until past midday,
and there was no sign of an ending.

At one o'clock a shell from our rear flew far above us, and then the
devil broke loose. More than a hundred guns joined in, and the air was
full of sounds. The Bliss barn was in flames. The Federal batteries
answering doubled the din and made the valley and its slopes a hell of
hideous noises. All of the enemy's missiles went far over our heads; we
were much nearer to the Federal artillery than to our own. Some of our
shells, perhaps from defective powder, fell amongst us; some would burst
in mid air, and the fragments would hurtle down. The skirmishing
ceased--in an ocean one drop more is naught.

I walked down the line of Company A. Peacock was lying dead with his hat
over his face. The wounded--those disabled--were unrelieved. The men
were prostrate in their pits, powder-stained, haggard, battle-worn, and
stern. Still shrieked the shells overhead, and yet roared the guns to
front and rear--a pandemonium of sight and sound reserved from the
foundation of the world for the valley of Gettysburg. The bleeding sun
went out in smoke. The smell of burning powder filled the land. Before
us and behind us bursting caissons added to the hellish magnificence of
this awful picture,--in its background a school of theology, and in its
foreground the peaceful city of the dead.

For more than an hour the hundreds of hostile guns shook earth and sky;
then there was silence and stillness. But the stillness was but brief.
Out from our rear and right now marched the Confederate infantry on to
destruction.

We of the skirmishers felt that our line was doomed. I saw men stand,
regardless of exposure, and curse the day. For more than eighteen hours
we had been near the Federal lines. We had no hope. We knew that our
line, marching out for attack, could not even reach the enemy. Before
it could come within charging distance it would be beaten to pieces by
artillery. The men looked at the advancing line and said one to another,
"Lee has made a mistake."

The line came on. It was descending the slope of Seminary R