Gettysburg Field of Battle Forever Consecrated

1907

At Gettysburg

Field of Battle Is Forever Consecrated to the Highest Ideals of American Valor.

See Naples and die!" wrote an enthusiast, and gave a new vogue to a moribund old world city by a sententious saying. But to the American whose soul is alive to patriotic emotion, a more fitting exhortation would be, see Gettysburg and live! And so seeing, live to be consecrated anew to American ideals. Realize and drink in from that historic fount the immortal lesson of "what they did here," that the nation might live — a grand object lesson, made manifest so that he that runs may read by its 600 monuments and tablets dedicated there to American valor.

A thrilling page it is that may be read in these silent yet speaking symbols which mark the various positions held by the 640 organizations that fiercely contended for victory during those fervid July days of '63. And punctuating the long lines of marble and granite memorials that thickly strew the picturesquely diversified field imposingly stand out the colossal bronze images of the leading generals in the commanding stations each occupied.

All the historic landmarks, too, are there to-day. Away to the west the Lutheran seminary, still standing like a sentinel on the outpost, round which the waves of battle raged and spumed and from the cupola of which Reynolds and Buford watched Hill's advance debouching from the woods on either side of the Chambersburg pike; and, just beyond, the undulating plain and McPherson's wood, the scene and altar of sacrifice whereon the valiant first corps of Meade's army unstintedly poured out its libation of blood. To the east and south, Cemetery hill and its prolonged ridge, along which stand out those never to be effaced features of the landscape — the national cemetery, with its 3,575 graves of union dead, the clump of trees or "high water mark of the rebellion," whence Pickett's braves were hurled back in disaster and death; the "bloody angle," and the peach orchard, which season after season renews itself in blossom and fruit; the wheat field, yearly sown to the same crop, but no longer yielding its "harvest of death"; grim Devil's Den, a rocky, wood-tangled maze to-day as it was and has ever been since the red Indian and savage beast sought it for their lair; the same wooded heights of Little and Big Roundtop, partly denuded, yet with many surviving ancient trees scarred and broken and torn by solid shot and shell, or trunks pimpled by many bullets, but fruitful yet with leafy life.

Vanished only are the mangled corpses of the slain, the rushing columns of struggling foeman. the blazing lines, the crash of musketry and cannon's deafening roar, the dying groans and frantic, swelling cheers. With all these marvelously preserved vestiges of the battle still defining its varying fortunes, and with the graphic story of the guides, very little exercise of the imagination is needed even to a stranger, none at all to the veteran who fought there to reconstruct the scene, and once seen render its realization vividly impressed forever on the mind.