The brilliant July moon rose and flooded this field of blood and death with silent glory. From every nook and corner, from every shadow and across every open space, through the hot breath of the night, came the moans of thousands, and louder than all the long agonizing cries for water. Many a man in grey crawled over the ragged rocks to press his canteen to the lips of his dying enemy in blue, and many a boy in blue did as much for the man in grey. Fifteen thousand wounded men lay there through the long black hours. At ten o'clock a wounded Christian soldier began to sing one of the old, sweet hymns of faith, whose words have come ringing down the ages wet with tears and winged with human hopes. In five minutes ten thousand voices of blue and grey, some of them quivering with the agony of death, had joined. For two hours the woods and hills rang with the songs of these wounded men. All through this pitiful music the Confederates were massing their artillery on Seminary Ridge, replacing their wounded horses and refilling their ammunition chests. The Union army were burrowing like moles and planting their terrible batteries on the brows of the hills beyond the town. At Lee's council of war that night Longstreet advised his withdrawal from Gettysburg into a more favorable position in the mountains. But the Confederate Commander, reinforced now by the arrival of Pickett's division of fifteen thousand men and Stuart's cavalry, determined to renew the battle. At the first grey streak of dawn on the 3rd the Federal guns roared their challenge to the Confederate forces which had captured their entrenchments on Culp's Hill. Seven terrible hours of bombardment, charge and counter charge followed until every foot of space had claimed its toll of dead, before the Confederates yielded the Hill. At noon there was an ominous lull in the battle. At one o'clock a puff of smoke from Seminary Ridge was followed by a dull roar. The signal gun had pealed its call of death to thousands. For two miles along the crest of this Ridge the Confederates had planted one hundred and fifty guns. Two miles of smoke-wreathed flame suddenly leaped from those hills in a single fiery breath. The longer line of big Federal guns on Seminary Ridge were silent for a few minutes and then answered gun for gun until the heavens were transformed into a roaring hell of bursting, screaming, flaming shells. For two hours the earth trembled beneath the shock of these volcanoes, and then the two storms died slowly away and the smoke began to lift. An ominous sign. The grey infantry were deploying in line under Pickett to charge the heights of Cemetery Ridge. Fifteen thousand gallant men against an impregnable hill held by seventy thousand intrenched soldiers, backed by the deadliest and most powerful artillery.