ever-increasing mass must be met, stopped, hurled back, or all is lost. Nearly in rear of the breach were two brigades, lying along the line of their stacked arms. In a few seconds after the order to "fall in," they were ready for action, and General Lee rode to their front. And the picture he made, as the grand old man sat there on his horse, with his noble head bare, and looked from right to left, as if to meet each eye that flashed along the line, can never be forgotten by a man that stood there.
And every soldier along that line knew what that look meant; that it meant—"Soldiers, follow your General"; knew that work so desperate was to be done, and that interests so tremendous hung upon its successful doing, that everything, even the life of our great Chief himself, must be put to the dreadful hazard, if necessary to secure the result. But those men needed no such order and no such example. They wanted no general or field marshal dismounted in their front to stimulate them to do and dare all in mortal power.
From three thousand lips at once burst the cry, "General Lee to the rear"—and not a foot would stir until he was led back through a gap in the line; and then the word was given, and the line moved forward, without pause, or waver, or break, right on up to the very face of the solid opposing mass; on, till sabres clashed and bayonets crossed; on, till the first line was driven back in confusion upon the second, and first and second upon the third; on, into the angle of the salient, where batteries, massed on right and massed on left, poured in a storm of shot and shell upon either flank; and still on, pressing back the stubborn heavy mass, covering the earth in piles with the slain, till the enemy, his organization lost in confusion, retired from the dreadful carnage, yielded back the captured works, and the crisis passed, and the field was saved.
Of the French engaged in what Napoleon calls the terrible passage of the bridge of Lodi, the loss was one in four. The proportion of loss in the force engaged in that charge on the 12th of May I do not know; but in one regiment—the centre regiment of one of the brigades, and if more exposed than others I know it not and know not why—the loss was one in two.
There was still another account of this scene, but agreeing with the two given above in all of the essential points, written at the time by the now Professor W. W. Smith, of Randolph-Macon College—then a beardless boy serving in the Forty-ninth Virginia regiment—which was so graphic that I will publish it so soon as I can obtain a copy.
A similar scene was enacted on the same day near the "bloody angle," where General Lee was only prevented from leading Harris' Mississippi brigade into the thickest of that terrible fight by the positive refusal of the men to go forward unless their beloved Chieftain would go to the rear.
