A battalion of artillery, thundering across a corner of the field, went into position upon a little hilltop. Facing it was Cemetery Hill and a tall and wide-arched gateway. This gateway, now clearly seen, now withdrawn behind a world of grey smoke, now showing a half arch, an angle, a span of the crest, exercised a fascination. The gunners, waiting for the word, watched it. “Gate of Death, don’t it look?—Gate of Death.”—“Wonder what’s beyond?”—“Yankees.”—“But they ain’t dead—they’re alive and kicking!”—“Now it’s hidden—Gate of Death.”—“This battle’s going to lay over Sharpsburg. Over Gaines’s Mill—over Malvern Hill—over Fredericksburg—over Second Manassas—over—” “The Gate’s hidden—there’s a battery over there going to open—” “One? there’s two, there’s three—” “_Cannoneers, to your pieces!_” A shell dug into the earth and exploded. There was a heavy rain of dark earth. It pattered against all the pieces. It showered men and horses, and for a minute made a thick twilight of the air. “Whew! the Earth’s taking a hand! Anybody hurt?”—“_Howitzer, load!_” “Gate of Death’s clear.” An artillery lieutenant,—Robert Stiles,—acting as volunteer aide to Gordon, was to make his way across the battle-field with information for Edward Johnson. The ground was strewn with the dead, the air was a shrieking torrent of shot and shell. The aide and his horse thought only of the thing in hand—getting across that field, getting across with the order. The aide bent to the horse’s neck; the horse laid himself to the ground and raced like a wild horse before a prairie fire. The aide thought of nothing; he was going to get the order there; for the rest his mind seemed as useless as a mirror with a curtain before it. Afterwards, however, when he had time to look he found in the mirror pictures enough. Among them was a picture of a battalion—Latimer’s battalion. “Never, before or after, did I see fifteen or twenty guns in such a condition of wreck and destruction as this battalion was! It had been hurled backward, as it were by the very weight and impact of metal, from the position it had occupied on the crest of a little ridge, into a saucer-shaped depression behind it; and such a scene as it presented!—guns dismounted and disabled, carriages splintered and crushed, ammunition chests exploded, limbers upset, wounded horses plunging and kicking, dashing out the brains of men tangled in the harness; while cannoneers with pistols were crawling round through the wreck shooting the struggling horses to save the lives of the wounded men.”