The battle of Gettysburg was the most important of the Civil War. Lee with seventy thousand men was pouring into the North. If he defeated Meade and the Union Army, Washington, the capital, would fall. Even Philadelphia and New York would be threatened. In three days of terrible fighting, thirty thousand men were killed. In one of the charges one regiment, the 1st Minnesota, lost eighty-two per cent. of its men--more than twice as many as the famous Light Brigade lost at Balaclava. Pickett's charge of fifteen thousand men over nearly a mile and a half against the hill which marked the center of the Union lines was one of the greatest charges in history. When the Confederates were driven back, two-thirds of the charging party had been killed or wounded. It was the crisis of the war. If that charge went home Gettysburg was lost, the Union Army would become a rabble and the whole strength of the Confederate forces would pass on into the North. On the Union batteries depended the whole fate of the army. If they could keep up a fire to the last moment, the charge must fail. Otherwise the picked thousands of the Confederate Army would break the center of the Union forces and the battle would be lost. Lee gathered together one hundred and fifteen guns and directed a storm of shot and shell against the Union batteries as his regiments charged up the hill. On the very crest was a battery commanded by young Cushing, a brother of Lieutenant W. B. Cushing, who drove a tiny torpedo launch over a boom of logs under the fire of forts, troops and iron-clads and destroyed the great Confederate iron-clad _Albemarle_. This Cushing was of the same fighting breed. During the battle he was shot through both thighs but would not leave his post though suffering agonies from the wounds. When the charge began he fought his battery as fast as the guns could be loaded and fired and his grape-shot and canister mowed down the charging Confederates by the hundred. In spite of tremendous losses the Rebels rushed up the hill firing as they came and so fierce was their fire and that of the Confederate batteries that of the Union officers in command of the batteries just in front of the charge, all but two were struck. But the men kept up the fire to the very last. As what was left of the Confederates topped the hill, a shell struck the wounded Cushing tearing him almost in two. He held together his mangled body with one hand and with the other fired his last gun and fell dead just as the Confederates reached the stone wall on the crest. They were so shattered by his fire that they were unable to hold the hill and were driven back and the battle won for the Union.