Fifteen thousand wounded men lay there through the long black hours.
At ten o'clock a wounded Christian soldier began to sing one of the old,
sweet hymns of faith, whose words have come ringing down the ages wet
with tears and winged with human hopes. In five minutes ten thousand
voices of blue and grey, some of them quivering with the agony of death,
had joined. For two hours the woods and hills rang with the songs of
these wounded men.
All through this pitiful music the Confederates were massing their
artillery on Seminary Ridge, replacing their wounded horses and
refilling their ammunition chests.
The Union army were burrowing like moles and planting their terrible
batteries on the brows of the hills beyond the town.
At Lee's council of war that night Longstreet advised his withdrawal
from Gettysburg into a more favorable position in the mountains. But the
Confederate Commander, reinforced now by the arrival of Pickett's
division of fifteen thousand men and Stuart's cavalry, determined to
renew the battle.
At the first grey streak of dawn on the 3rd the Federal guns roared
their challenge to the Confederate forces which had captured their
entrenchments on Culp's Hill. Seven terrible hours of bombardment,
charge and counter charge followed until every foot of space had claimed
its toll of dead, before the Confederates yielded the Hill.
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