Just like my last passion blog entry, I am telling the story of my own experiences as if they were through the eyes of a real Civil War soldier. In this entry, I will complete the telling of my experience on Culp’s Hill at the Battle of Gettysburg.
Map of the second day at the Battle of Gettysburg. Culp’s Hill is located just southeast of town.
We rose up from behind the barricade, and 500 rifles leveled down the hill. As the officers screamed the order, the wall exploded in a blaze of fire and we showered the charging rebels with a staggering volley. It was the first shot I’d fired in anger. I didn’t aim for anyone in particular. You scarcely had to, there were so many of them. I don’t know if I hit anyone or if I killed anyone that first shot, but it would scarcely matter later, for there were times I knew I had brought a man down. As we reloaded, the rebs struggled up to a fair distance from our entrenchments and took cover wherever they could – behind trees, under fallen logs, under rock ledges. Digging in their heels in their own positions and laying down amidst the brush, they began to fire up at us, taking careful, calculated shots at us. The officers gave us the order to fire at will and the men began opening up fire and random intervals, making a staccato roar that rarely seemed to cease.
The men of the 150th New York rest in between attacks. Chase and I pictured at the right.
As bullets whizzed over our heads, Chase and I kept our heads low and below the brim of the barricade. We’d rise up in tandem, firing down into the woods, now filling with smoke, as the other reloaded. At times, the rebel line would shudder, and at last they began to fall back down the hill to reform. We were left momentarily in comparative silence. The boys of the 150th New York took out new packages of ammunition from their cartridge boxes and prepared for the next wave that was sure to come. I looked to my right and saw that Chase was shaking. He was horrifically shaken by the firing, and with some effort from other men of the company, we managed to calm him down.
That shrill shriek, the rebel yell, broke the silence again, and up the hill they came screaming again. Again we waited, and again we poured another volley into them. After firing, I lingered too long above the cover of the barricade and took a bullet to my left forearm. Chase, again shaken beyond belief, dragged me a few yards behind the barricade and tried to bind up the wound. Trying to calm him, I told him I’d manage and that he should return to the firing line. Dazed and confused, I lay against a tree watching the carnage unfold around me. A good number of men in the regiment had also been hit. Some were lucky and slightly wounded like me. A good number, however, were dead, head wounds mostly. As I looked down the line, I heard the sickening slap of lead hitting flesh near me, and turned in time to see Chase, my best friend, writhing in agony on the ground, shot in the throat. I scrambled over to him and screamed for help, from anyone at all. He didn’t last much longer after that. He died in my arms, and as the battle died away, night fell, and the rebs retreated down the hill into the darkness, I wept over his body while other men of the company gathered around. After a while, I brought myself to leave him and stand alone by the barricade. Around my feet was the tattered detritus of battle: torn cartridge papers, broken equipment, leaves clipped by bullets from the trees. Down below, in the darkness, the fireflies emerged, alighting the hell-stricken forest. But their beauty was pointless amidst the pitiful cries and moans of dying Confederate soldiers on the slopes below. I watched the little yellow lights hover over some motionless gray masses just down the hill from the barricade and thought what hell war was.
We buried Chase that night on the hill, his blanket for a burial shroud. I sent his personal effects home to his mother and father.
I have to say, participating in something like this and actually experiencing something like that, it’s just… Wow, I don’t even know how to describe it. As military historians, we often wonder, “What was it like to be there? To be down there on the lines, in the thick of it?” Though I’ll never understand the pain of losing my best friend right in front of me, the horror of seeing men die, the guilt of knowing you’ve killed someone… I feel that reenacting has at least brought me a little closer to understanding the psyche of the average soldier in the Civil War. However, I pray I’ll never experience the full horror of the things they saw. Those men went to hell and back, and even the most intense reenactment could never provide a replication of that.
Reenactment of the Civil War has always interested me to the greatest extent because it truly is amazing to see, hear, smell, feel and in general, experience what many men (and boys) went through in fighting against those who were fellow Americans (and possibly even family members). Each soldier of the Union or Confederate army fought for what they believed in to the death, and with the ferocity of the single war which has taken more American lives than any other conflict that this great nation has been engaged in.