Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Three).djvu/29

 my right and center were not only confronted by largely superior forces, but also that my right was becoming seriously overlapped. I had ordered General Barlow to refuse his right wing, that is to place his right brigade, Colonel Gilsa's, a little in the right rear of his other brigade, in order to use it against a possible flanking movement by the enemy.

But I now noticed that Barlow, be it that he had misunderstood my order, or that he was carried away by the ardor of the conflict, had advanced his whole line and lost connection with my Third Division on his left, and in addition to this, he had, instead of refusing, pushed forward his right brigade, so that it formed a projecting angle with the rest of the line. At the same time I saw the enemy emerging from the belt of woods on my right with one battery after another and one column of infantry after another, threatening to envelop my right flank and to cut me off from the town and the position on Cemetery Hill behind.

I immediately gave orders to the Third Division to re-establish its connection with the First, although this made still thinner a line already too thin, and hurried one staff officer after another to General Howard with the urgent request for one of his two reserve brigades to protect my right against the impending flank attack by the enemy. Our situation became critical. As far as we could judge from the reports of prisoners and from what we observed in our front, the enemy was rapidly advancing the whole force of at least two of his army-corps—A. P. Hill's, and Ewell's, against us, that is to say, 40,000 men, of whom at least 30,000 were then before us. We had 17,000, counting in the two brigades held in reserve by General Howard and not deducting the losses already suffered by the First Corps. Less than 14,000 men we had at that moment in the open field without the slightest advantage of