Friend and foe alike have borne testimony to the steadiness with which this gallant band met the ordeal--by much the hardest that falls to the soldier's lot--of having to endure a terrible fire without the power of returning it. No sooner had the long gray lines come within range than the Union artillery opened upon it, right and left. For a quarter of an hour the march was kept up in the face of a storm of missiles. Cemetery Hill was lighted up by the flashes. Little Round Top struck in sharply. Smoke and flame burst from the batteries along Cemetery Ridge. Solid shot tore through the ranks; shells were bursting under their feet, over their heads, in their faces; men, or the fragments of men, were being tossed in the air every moment, but, closing up the gaps and leaving swaths of dead and dying in their track, these men kept up their steady march to the front, as if conscious that the eyes of both armies were upon them. They had been told that the enemy's artillery was silenced! [Sidenote: Pickett's Advance.] As soon as they could do so without injury to their own men, the Confederate guns began afresh, so that again shells streamed through the air and balls bounded over the plain without intermission, dense smoke shutting out the assailants from view. Protected by the fire of this redoubtable artillery, the column continued its deliberate march. When within five hundred yards, or about to cross the Emmettsburg road, it suddenly moved off by the left flank a short distance, as if to close up a break in the line or recover the true point of attack--some say one and some say the other. Be that as it may, Pickett's men first received the fire of Stannard's Vermont brigade while making this flank march, and again encountered it on their flank after facing to the front for the purpose of resuming their advance toward the heights. This must be considered, we think, as the turning-point in the assault. Stannard's attack, made at such close quarters, so shattered Pickett's right brigade that this flank of the assaulting column never reached the crest at all, but drifted more and more to the rear, lost to all organization. Thus was repeated that memorable manœuvre of the Fifty-second Regiment against the Imperial Guard at Waterloo, and with like results; for before the close and deadly fire poured in upon them at only a few rods' distance--a fire they were powerless to return--Pickett's right was either shot to pieces or crowded in upon the centre, so throwing it into disorder and checking its momentum, while the Green Mountain boys, aided now by other troops, clung to their mutilated flank, following it up step by step, and firing into it as fast as the men could load.