THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
to the “double quick,” and then rode ahead with my staff. Soon I met on the road fugitives from Gettysburg, men, women and children, who seemed to be in great terror. I remember especially a middle-aged woman, who tugged a small child by the hand and carried a large bundle on her back. She tried to stop me, crying out at the top of her voice: “Hard times at Gettysburg! They are shooting and killing! What will become of us!” Still I did not hear any artillery fire until I had reached the ridge of a rise of ground before me. Until then the waves of sound had passed over my head unperceived.
About 11:30 I found General Howard on an eminence east of the cemetery of Gettysburg, from which we could overlook a wide plain. Immediately before us Gettysburg, a comfortable-looking town of a few thousand inhabitants. Beyond and on both sides of it, stretching far away an open landscape dotted with little villages and farmhouses and orchards and tufts of trees and detached belts of timber; two creeks, Willoughby's Run on the left and Rock Creek on the right; radiating from the town westward and eastward, well-defined roads—counting from right to left the Hanover road, the York Pike, the Gettysburg and Hanover railroad, the Hunterstown road, the Harrisburg road, the Carlisle road, the Mummasburg road, the Cashtown and Chambersburg Pike, the Hagerstown road, and behind us the roads on which our troops were coming—the Emmitsburg road, the Taneytown road, and the Baltimore road. The elevated spot from which we overlooked this landscape was Cemetery Hill, being the northern end of a ridge which terminated due south in two steep, rocky knolls partly wooded, called the Round Tops—half a mile distant on our right a hill called Culp's Hill, covered with timber; and opposite our left, about a mile distant, a ridge running almost parallel with Cemetery Ridge, called
[ 5 ]
