The Battle of Gettysburg

              THE   BATTLE   OF   GETTYSBURG. 2T
The battle still rages all along the left, where the Fifth Corps is, and the West slope of Round Top is the scene of the conflict ; and nearer us there was but short abatement, as the last of the Third Corps retired from the field, for the enemy is flushed with his success. He has been throwing forward brigade aft&r brigade, and Division after Division, since the battle began, and his advanc¬ ing line now extends almost as far to our right as the right of the Second Division of the Second Corps. The whole slope in our front is full of them ; and in various formation, in line, in column, and in masses which are neither, with yells and thick volleys, they are rushing towards our crest. The Third Corps is out of the way. Now we are in for it. The battery men are ready by their loaded guns. All along the crest is ready. Now Arnold and Brown—now Cushing, and Woodruff, and Rhorty !—you three shall survive to-day ! They drew the cords that moved the friction primers, and gun after gun, along all the batteries, in rapid succession, leaped where it stood and bellowed its canister upon the enemy. The enemy still advance. The infantry open fire—first the two advance regiments, the 15th Mass. and the 82d N. Y.—then here and there throughout the length of the long line, at the points where the enemy comes nearest, and soon the whole crest, artillery and infantry, is one continued sheet of fire. From Round Top to near the Cemetery stretches an uninterrupted field of conflict. There is a great army upon each side, now hotly engaged. , -       ,
To see the fight, while it went on. in the valley below us, was terrible,—-what must it be now, when we are in it, and it is all around us, in all its fury ?
All senses for the time are dead but the one of sight. The roar of the discharges and the yells of the enemy all pass unheeded ; but the impassioned soul is all eyes, and sees all things, that the smoke does not hide. How madly the battery men are driving home the double charges of canister in those broad-mouthed Napoleons, whose fire seems almost to reach the enemy. How rapidly these long, blue-coated lines of infantry deliver their file fire down the slope.
But there is ho faltering—the men stand nobly to their work. Men are dropping dead or wounded on all sides, by scores and by hundreds, and the poor mutilated creatures, some with an arm dangling, some with a leg broken by a bullet, are limping .and crawling towards the rear. They make no sound of complaint or pain, but are as silent as if dumb and mute. A sublime heroism seems to pervade all, and the intuition that to lose that crest, all is lost. How our officers, in the work of cheering on and directing the men, are falling.
We have heard that Gen. Zook and Col. Cross, in the First Division of our Corps, are mortally  wounded—they both  com-