Half a prayer, half a dream, and thousands said it, looking sidelong at neighbors and friends, nods, tight grins of acknowledgment, a few weak gibes. A rabbit kicked up out of the grass in front of Ruger's brigade, dashing along a farm lane in a mad panic back and forth before it finally cut straight between the legs of the soldiers and went tearing back to the rear. Men laughed, shouting they wished they could trade places.
The Napoleons in the lower battery, whose front they had yet to cross, continued to fire, pounding the opposite line, the sharp, almost bell-like "sprang" of the guns echoing with each discharge.
The ground started to slope outward into a gentle decline. Ahead was a sharp bank that tumbled down half a dozen feet, marking the divide between hills and flood plain. Men slid down the grassy slope, some falling, comrades reaching out to help pull each other up, officers shouting to keep alignment, to keep moving.
The first wave was into the bottomland pastures, a giant undulating wave of men, one man for each foot and a half of front, two ranks deep, nearly a mile across. Behind them the second wave of two ranks was a hundred yards to their rear, behind that the third wave of Gibbon's division and Lockwood's brigade. Deployed-out in heavy column, a division wide and three divisions deep, eighteen thousand men of Sedgwick's corps, just beginning to crest the ridge, poised to exploit any breakthrough that developed.
The grass in the bottomland was thicker, tangled mats in places, the ground soggy after the rain. Men began to lose their shoes, unable to stop to retrieve them, continuing on with wet wool socks sagging, peeling off.
The shells from the enfilading fire cut in across the front; men began to drop. Mercifully, the ground was damp enough that when a round ball or bolt hit, it tended to plow into the earth, the notoriously poor fuses of the Confederate artillery going out in the spray of muck. Airbursts of case shot, however, sprayed down on the lines. Here and there a man dropped, or cried out, stumbling away from the line. In Zook's brigade, one well-placed bolt came skimming in, dropping a dozen men in one bloody burst, officers shouting for the ranks to close up, to keep moving.
The first wave was a hundred yards into the pasture. Union skirmishers in the field now stood up, some sprinting back the few yards to fall in with their comrades, others waiting for the first wave to pass over them. The creek tended to favor the south bank of the valley, though in places it meandered out in its slow, wandering course, looping to midfield. The first wave was nearly upon it, men able to see its waters now, really nothing more than a shallow, muddy flow, in places so narrow that an energetic farm boy could leap it in one bound.
And then, along most of the front-in spite of the rumbling of the cannons, the shouts of their own officers, the banging of tin cups on canteens, the sloshing of wet leather-they heard it The command racing down the Confederate front line, picked up by officers, riflemen shouting the order in response.
"Ready!"
A wall seemed to materialize out of the ground, a wall of butternut, gray, occasional splashes of sky blue trousers, rifle barrels, several thousand of them held high.
The range was in some places 300 yards, in others, such as the approach to the burning mill, less than 150.
‘Take aim!"
The barrels dropped; hammers clicked back. For those in the very front rank there was the terrible moment, the strange illusion that made it look as if every rifle was aiming straight at you.
"Steady, boys! Steady!" the cry echoed across the Union line. No matter how brave, how determined they were, there was an involuntary flinch, a slowing down, as mere flesh recoiled in anticipation of what was about to be unleashed upon them.
Time distorted. Some felt as if every step taken now seemed to transcend into an eternity. Some could look only at the guns; others could not look. A few gazed heavenward beseechingly; some noticed the most trivial of things, a frightened dove kicking up out of the tall grass, a grasshopper poised on a stalk of grass, about to jump, the sidelong glance of a beloved comrade who in another second would be dead, the back of an officer, hat poised on sword blade, who had turned, looking back to shout something to his men that could not be heard.
"Fire!"
The command was barely heard by either side. As if a single hand had struck the flame, in an instant three thousand rifles discharged.
Three thousand rounds of.58-cal. slashed across the open field, muzzle velocity slow at but seven to eight hundred feet per second, but carrying a frightful punch, the conical round weighing close to an ounce, made of soft lead. Sometimes the rounds sounded like the buzz of an angry bee or the hiss of a snake, and if it passed close enough to you, you'd feel the smack of the shock wave. '
If it hit human flesh, the sound was audible, like an open-handed slap. The slower speed, at that instant, that microsecond as the bullet struck, actually made the impact more deadly; the round would begin to flatten out, distort as it first penetrated cloth, striking a button, a cartridge box sling, or belt plate. Often it would begin to tumble, glancing off at a slight angle, mushrooming out as it tore into the body, and traveling so slow that it was not sterilized by the heat of its passage, dragging with it bits of black powder, tallow that had been used to grease the ball, and fragments of whatever it had struck first before entering the body.
Arteries that might have been cauterized by the passage of a high-speed jacketed round were instead torn open, the next pulse of the heart sending out the first spray of bright arterial blood. The truly frightful moment was when the round struck bone. It did not punch through a bone; rather it shattered it, the shock of the blow causing the bone to disintegrate laterally, fracture lines and fissures often running the length of that bone clear up to the joint Here the bullet would flatten out even more, to the diameter of a quarter, at times to nearly a half dollar, tearing everything in its path. If there was enough momentum left the hunk of lead would exit the body, pulling out fragments of broken bone, marrow, flesh, and blood with it sometimes striking a man behind the victim, injuring him as well, or spraying him with the contents of the comrade in front
If the ball struck between rib cage and pelvis, death was just a matter of time, be it seconds if a main artery was hit or days of slow agony if it simply lodged in the intestine. A man shot crosswise might have his liver shattered, the stomach or small intestine punctured,- the kidney torn apart Within minutes he would begin to bloat up, as blood cascaded into his abdominal cavity.
To be shot through the lungs was almost as bad. It took time to die unless the bundle of arteries and veins linked directly to the heart was severed. The lungs would slowly fill up with blood and liquid, each breath a struggle to keep from drowning, sometimes the air wheezing in and out of the bullet hole.
If one was to be struck, and die, then the lucky shot was to the head or the heart It would be barely felt if it was the head, just a sudden going out of the light If in the heart more than one man would actually stop, look down, and have a few seconds to comprehend what had just happened, perhaps enough time to even look up at a friend with that strange, quizzical look of men when they know they are dead but have yet to fall back into the earth.
For several hundred along that first line, this is what now happened. Rounds thwacked into the first line; men grunted from the blows, those who survived describing it as feeling like you had been kicked by a mule or hit with an ax handle. Some just simply collapsed, comrades to either side sprayed with blood and gray, sticky matter if the man next to them had been hit in the head. Others turned, staggering backward, dropping rifles, more than one man not being hit by a round but struck instead by a broken musket spinning through the air or from splinters kicked back as a ball tore through a gun stock.