With the first streak of day the struggle for the possession of Culp's Hill began again. As both sides had orders to attack, there was no delay in commencing. Soon from every commanding spot the Union batteries were sending their shot crashing and tearing through the woods in which the Confederates lay hid, smiting the forest with a tempest of iron, throwing down branches, and plowing up the earth in great furrows.[72] Stirred up by this shower of missiles, Ewell's men poured forth from the valley of Rock Creek, and rushed up the hillside in front, to begin anew the sanguinary struggle they had only ceased from on the previous night. Here among the gray rocks and aged oaks--the pleasure-ground, in fact, of the people of Gettysburg--a contest raged for hours, similar to that which Little Round Top had witnessed on the previous afternoon. One piece of hopeless heroism deserves commemoration in all accounts of this battle. In the height of the engagement an order was brought for two regiments, the Second Massachusetts and the Twenty-seventh Indiana, to charge across the meadow stretching between Culp's Hill and McAllister's Hill, on the other side of which the enemy lay in the old intrenchments. To try to pass that meadow was rushing to certain destruction. "Are you sure that is the order?" was demanded of the officer who brought it. "Positive," was the reply. "Up, men--fix bayonets--forward!" was the ringing command. One regiment reached the works, the other faltered midway under the terrible fire. As many were lost in falling back as in going forward. Only half the men got back to the lines unhurt. [Sidenote: Culp's Hill retaken.] After seven hours of this kind of fighting, the assailants were finally driven beyond Rock Creek again, leaving five hundred prisoners, besides their dead and wounded, behind them. Again an essential part of Lee's plan of attack had signally failed, and once more the whole Union line stretched unbroken from Culp's Hill to Round Top. But it was only eleven o'clock; and though the battle had gone against him on this side, Lee seems to have felt, like Desaix at Marengo, that there was still time to gain another. Was it here that Lee lost that moral equipoise which seems born in really great commanders in moments of supreme peril? [Sidenote: The Cannonade.]