Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 4.djvu/102

84 quick and with a yell, the enemy s batteries, which were strongly supported by infantry across this field, a distance of 500 yards. We, at the same time, were enfiladed by grapeshot; neither fire upon the flank or front at all stopped the men, but on they pressed, and soon silenced the fire.&quot; In this charge, Col. C. C. Lee was killed and Colonel Lane wounded. The rest of A. P. Hill’s division did not go into action until very late in the afternoon. Then Field, followed by Fender with his North Carolinians, pressed eagerly forward. A. P. Hill says: &quot;General Pender, moving up to support Field, found that he had penetrated so far in advance that the enemy were between himself and Field. A regiment of Federals, moving across his front and exposing a flank, was scattered by a volley. Pender continued to move forward, driving off a battery of rifled pieces.&quot; It was the charge of Field and Pender that finally broke the obstinate line of McCall, to whose hard fighting that day Longstreet pays this tribute: &quot;He was more tenacious of his battle than any one who came within my experience during the war, if I except D. H. Hill at Sharpsburg."

The failure of all his officers to join Longstreet in this battle, in which it had been hoped to deliver a crushing blow to McClellan, was a great disappointment to General Lee. A united attack at Frayser s Farm would have saved the costly effusion of blood at Malvern Hill. The last battle of the &quot;Great Retreat,&quot; Malvern Hill, was, like later Gettysburg, one of those terrific shocks of conflict in which, without apparent strategy, without apparent remembrance of man s vulnerability, dauntless soldiers were continuously hurled into the muzzles of as splendidly served artillery as ever unlimbered on field of battle. Presumably, such battles are at times military necessities, yet in view of their destructiveness, it is not surprising that a Confederate general recalling the French officer’s sarcastic comment on the English charge at Balaklava, &quot;It is magnificent, but it is not war,&quot;