Hood's men pressed on in face of the fire opened upon them, and with a desperate determination rarely equaled even in this war, endeavored to conquer the position in a hand to hand struggle. The men on both sides saw the vital importance of the position and fought for its possession like so many war-drunken demons. They fought hand to hand, using bayonets when too close together to load and fire. They brained each other with the butts of their muskets. They assailed each other with bowie knives. They even resorted to the use of stones, hurling them in each other's faces and breaking each other's skulls with heavy boulders. In the end Hood's attack was baffled, and Warren held the hill. But for his alertness in seeing the necessity and his wonderful determination in seizing the opportunity, the battle must have been lost then and there; for, with his guns planted on Little Round Top, Lee could quickly have compelled the whole Federal line to retire and seek some other field of fighting. Probably in all the course of the war the margin between victory and defeat was never at any point narrower than it was in that desperate struggle for possession of Little Round Top, about sunset on the second day of July, 1863. Never anywhere, before or since, was there fiercer fighting. Never anywhere did soldiers give a better account of themselves. Officers, from lieutenants to generals, fell in numbers by the side of their enlisted men, and over the whole slope the ground was strewn with the dead and the dying. Some of them wore the blue, and some of them the gray--about equal numbers in each uniform--but all of them were Americans and the memory of their heroism is the common heritage of all the people of the great Republic. During these two days of terrific fighting the Federals had got distinctly the worst of it. The Confederates had not won a victory, but they had at any rate secured advantages that might well give their adversaries pause. General Meade called a council of war after the firing ceased on the night of the second. He has himself declared that he had no thought of retreating after the fashion that had been established by usage in the Army of the Potomac. General Meade's truthfulness is wholly above suspicion. But General Doubleday has pretty conclusively shown that General Meade's memory was at fault in this and that his object in calling the council of war was to take the opinions of his lieutenants as to whether he should withdraw from the Gettysburg position--as the Army of the Potomac had withdrawn from so many others after being worsted in battle--or should stay there and fight the matter out.