Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 4.djvu/104

86 army, General Lee ordered an assault, and the Confederates prepared for the &quot;red wrath of the fray.&quot;

The Federals, with calm reliance upon their impregnable position, waited their adversaries; none knows better than the American soldier when he is, to use his own vernacular, &quot;fixed for fighting.&quot; Draper says: &quot;There were crouching cannon waiting for them (Confederates), and ready to defend all the approaches. Sheltered by ditches, fences, ravines, were swarms of infantry. There were horsemen picturesquely careening over the noontide sun-seared field. Tier after tier of batteries were grimly visible upon the slope, which rose in the form of an amphitheater. With a fan-shaped sheet of fire they could sweep the incline, a sort of natural glacis up which the assailants must advance. A crown of cannon was on the brow of the hill. The first line of batteries could only be reached by traversing an open space of from 300 to 400 yards, exposed to grape and canister from the artillery and musketry from the infantry. If that were carried, another and still more difficult remained in the rear.

In the strained, tense hush that precedes a battle, when the heart-throbs of even battle-tried soldiers communicate a restless quiver to their bayonet tips, many a North Carolina soldier of only a few months experience felt that in vain would he throw himself against that hill grim with the engines of death, and many a lad fresh from the family hearth-stone and there were many such there that July day knew that if he could acquit him self nobly when all those guns opened, battle would thereafter have few terrors for him. Yet all were ready to follow their colors.

General Lee’s order of battle was that when Armistead, who occupied the highest ground, should see that the artillery made any break in the Federal front, he should charge with a shout, and the other brigades, on hearing his advance, should simultaneously attack. Per-