Europe -- Description and travel; United States -- Description and travel
We had the best escort possible in
the person of Rosengarten, who was aide-decamp to General Reynolds,
commander of the corps which came up first and sustained the whole
weight of battle on the first day. Field also “came along,” and we had
a first-rate time on our journey over the Susquehanna bridge, which the
Northern militia burnt behind them as they escaped from Lee’s advance.
Then we stopped for an hour or two, waiting for a train at York, a nice
shady quiet country town of 11,000 inhabitants. The rebels had occupied
the place for three days and levied a matter of 80,000 dollars on the
people; in all other respects they seem to have behaved excellently and
to have been well under command. The old Episcopalian clergyman, a warm
friend of England, who had been Rosengarten’s tutor, and to whom we paid
a visit, gave us a capital description of the three days’ occupation,
and of the relief the York folk experienced when the poor ragged rebels
marched off for Gettysburg, and left the town very little poorer than
they had found it. We didn’t get to our inn, a huge wooden building on
the first day’s battlefield, till after sunset. Tea over, we came out
on the wooden platform which runs all round the house, and saw the most
glorious sight I have ever seen, I think, in the skies. Steaming up
Memphremagog we saw the aurora borealis splendidly, but that was nothing
to this. In Canada there was no colour in the pure flashes of light
which lit and pulsed over the whole sky, but on Saturday the changes of
colour were splendid, and I should say for half an hour the heavens were
throbbing with the most lovely rose-coloured streamers and sheets and
flashes. With my view of the importance to the poor old world of
the struggle which was descending there, you can fancy that such an
introduction to it was welcome and impressive. Next day we devoted to
the battlefield: began at the beginning where, on Thursday the 1st July
1863, Rosengarten himself, as Reynolds’s aide-decamp, had ridden forward
and placed the first Federal regiments which came on the ground in
position between the town of Gettysburg, which contains about 3000
inhabitants and lies in a hollow, and the advancing rebels. Gettysburg
is at the junction of three roads and was a point which both armies were
bent on seizing. The fight on this the north-east side of the town began
early on Thursday. Rosengarten, after carrying out his orders, rode
back, and was just in time to see his General fall from his horse, shot
through the neck by a sharpshooter, and helped to carry him off the
field. After many hours’ hard fighting the Federals were driven back
through the town with heavy loss. Our friend, General Barlow, who
commanded a brigade, was also badly wounded. Luckily, during the day
two more corps of the army of the Potomac had come up and been placed in
position on a hill just to the south of the town, on part of which
the cemetery now stands, which was made immortal by Lincoln’s glorious
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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