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7 “Unwept and Unhonored” The Retreat from Pennsylvania The tiny remnant of the Florida brigade, numbering slightly fewer than 300 men, re-formed at its pre-charge position in the depression behind the artillery . No descriptive material is known to exist for Col. Lang’s command during the late afternoon on July 3. It must, however, have been a pathetic sight. The slightly wounded, with anguished, powder-blackened faces, joined the healthy few behind the Virginia cannoneers, anxiously peering through the clinging fog of gun smoke for the approach of the enemy.1 All about lay the wreckage of the two great armies.The cries, moans, curses, and prayers of the wounded mingled with the rattle of musketry and occasional boom of artillery. The combined stench of the unburied dead and the smell of gunpowder created an indescribably nauseating odor. Both the Rebels and Yankees seemed too weary to continue fighting.“Both armies laid [in] line of battle like two wounded tigers,” an officer of Wilcox’s Alabama brigade recalled, “tired of the fray, prone on the ground, panting and glaring at each other with bloodshot eyes.”2 Despite three days of slaughter and the horrid landscape around them, both the Army of Northern Virginia and the Florida brigade remained confident and full of fight. Lt. Col. Hillary A. Herbert, commanding the Eighth Alabama , wrote: “Soon [after re-forming] General Lee . . . rode slowly along our front, the majestic mien of horse and rider, both as calm as a May morning would have tended to reassure us, if reassurance had been necessary. . . . we were not demoralized. Every man of us felt that if the enemy should have attacked our position his repulse would have been as disastrous as ours had been.” A common soldier stated the Rebel’s feelings more succinctly. “We will fight them until Hell freezes over,” he declared, “and then fight them on the ice.”3 Retreat from Pennsylvania / 81 After nightfall, Maj. Gen. R. H. Anderson ordered his division back from its exposed position west of the Emmitsburg Road.But there was no rest for the weary. The Confederates fell back to Spangler’s Woods along Seminary Ridge and constructed a defensive line.These works were a “long line of breastworks and rifle pits, extending two and a half miles from the Mummasburg to the Emmitsburg Road. The trees on top of the ridges hid the entrenchments because the Southerners placed them on the western sides of the slopes.” Lee undoubtedly hoped Meade might be foolish enough to assault his graycoats the following morning, and he might yet gain the victory.4 The blasted battleground may have resembled a suburb of hell, but it literally crawled with activity. Union and Confederate pickets crouched among the dead and dying, and the ambulatory wounded used the cover of darkness to hide their escape. Many men slipped across the killing fields searching for loved ones or close comrades. “Human jackals” used the darkness for the less noble purpose of robbing the dead.5 Adj. James B. Johnson, of the Fifth Florida, drew the unenviable duty of leading a small force back onto the battlefield to guard against surprise attacks. “I had to post the picket line,” Johnson recalled, “and the dead and wounded literally covered the ground. I ran into a force of Yankees, but they gave back, neither side wanted to make any noise by firing. All night long could be heard the pitiful appeals from the wounded for water, water.”6 Dawn brought a Fourth of July to Gettysburg that was anything but glorious .Rain fell much of the day in torrents.Many of the soldiers believed that the heavens were crying. Blackened, swollen corpses added to the misery of soggy earth and clothing. Some corpses were now three days old, and the odor of the human and animal detritus caused skirmishers and burial parties alike to retch and gag. A Rebel lieutenant gazed with revulsion at the sight of corpses sitting “upright against a fence, with arms extended in the air and faces hideous with something very like a fixed leer as if taking a fiendish pleasure in showing us what we essentially were and at any moment might become.”7 A Southern soldier described burying the dead as “the most trying of all the duties of the soldier.” Officers detailed men from each company, armed with shovels, to search their area for the dead. The men dug shallow pits and entombed the bodies where they fell...

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