Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Three).djvu/24

 Seminary Ridge, from the Lutheran Seminary buildings on its crest—the whole a smiling landscape inhabited by a peaceable people wont to harvest their crops and to raise their children in quiet and prosperous contentment.

From where we stood we observed the thin lines of troops, and here and there puffy clouds of white smoke on and around Seminary Ridge, and heard the crackle of the musketry and the booming of the cannon, indicating a forward movement of our First Corps, which we knew to be a little over 8000 men strong. Of the troops themselves we could see little. I remember how small the affair appeared to me, as seen from a distance in the large frame of the surrounding open country. But we were soon made painfully aware of the awful significance of it. The dead body of General Reynolds, the commander of the First Corps, was being carried away from the field. He had been too far forward in the firing-line and the bullet of a Southern sharpshooter had laid him low. So the action had begun with a great loss. He was known as an officer of superior merit, and in the opinion of many it was he that ought to have been put at the head of the Army of the Potomac. General Reynolds' death devolved the command of the First Corps upon General Doubleday, the command of all the troops then on the field upon General Howard, and the command of the Eleventh Corps upon me.

The situation before us was doubtful. We received a report from General Wadsworth, one of the division commanders of the First Corps, that he was advancing, that the enemy's forces in his front were apparently not very strong, but that he thought that the enemy was making a movement towards his right. From our point of observation we could perceive but little of the strength of the enemy, and Wadsworth's dispatch did not relieve our uncertainty. If the enemy