They Saw It Happen

GETTYSBURG (308 pp.)--Earl Schenck Miers and Richard A. Brown--Rutgers ($3.50).

Crossing a road near Gettysburg, 13-year-old Billy Bayly met a mud-splashed Union cavalryman. Said Billy: "Hello . . . What's up?" ". . . You'll find out what's up," snapped the soldier, "the Rebel cavalry [are] close on my heels ... git or you'll be got."

Billy didn't git; like any boy, he was thrilled at the prospect of seeing a real battle. When the Army of Northern Virginia hove in sight, "wave after wave, billow after billow," Billy was squatting on top of a fence, all set to see the fun.

Billy is one of 42 eyewitnesses whose reports on the Battle of Gettysburg are the chief feature of this book. Historians have long since figured out just what happened at that decisive conflict, but Editors Miers and Brown have added a new wrinkle to the old subject by showing what the battle looked like to those who fought it, or watched it from ringside seats.

Dirty Foreigners. Two years of fighting had separated North from South with deep, bitter emotions. When youthful John Dooley, a Virginian soldier, compared the "dignified but most courteous" appearance of his hero, General Lee, with the sullen demeanor of the frightened citizens of Pennsylvania, he simply concluded that the Unionists were as different from the Confederates as another "race of people." So it seemed, also, to Gettysburg Housewife Sallie Broadhead, as she watched Lee's vanguard outside her house. The Southerners were "a miserable-looking set" of alien monsters with a "traitor's flag" who pranced barefoot to horrible "Southern tunes."

Five days later (July1), Sallie rose early, "to get my baking done before any battle would begin"; but she had scarcely "put my bread in the pans when the cannons began to fire"--and the Battle of Gettysburg was under way. When Sallie Broadhead turned to her diary at nightfall, "the town was full of the filthy Rebels," cock-a-hoop with success: "all is quiet, but 0! how I dread tomorrow."

Polkas & Waltzes. When tomorrow dawned, Colonel Sir Arthur Fremantle, British observer with the Confederate Army, was sitting in the top of a tree, looking out over the field. Under the same tree sat Generals Robert E. Lee and A. P. Hill, planning the day's action and "assisting their deliberations by the truly American custom of whittling sticks." Shells and bullets began to hiss and whine once more; but in his Gettysburg garden Sallie Broadhead's husband doggedly "picked a mess of beans . . . [and] persevered until he had picked all, for he declared the Rebels should not have one." Soon, the smoke of battle grew so thick that gawking young

Billy Bayly was disgusted: he was scarcely able to see a thing. On the Union side, General Meade's horse ran away with him, and his staff followed (they all returned to the righting eventually); a Confederate band struck up the gayest "polkas and waltzes"; Sir Arthur found it "very curious."

"We thought," said Union Headquarters Aide Frank Haskell, of the third day's fighting, "that at the second Bull Run, at the Antietam, and at Fredericksburg . . . we had heard heavy cannonading; they were but holiday salutes compared with this . . . great oaks heave down their massy branches ... as if the lightning smote them ... [I saw] a man bent up, with his face to the ground in the attitude of a Pagan worshipped . . . [and] I went and said to him, 'Do not lie there like a toad. Why not go to your regiment and be a man?' He turned up his face with a stupid, terrified look . . . and then without a word turned his nose to the ground." Other men, mad with terror, tried to hide in a fold in the ground: over them stood Union General Gibbon, saying "in a tone of kindly expostulation: 'My men . . . All these matters are in the hands of God, and nothing that you can do will make you safer.' "

"My Fault." After Pickett's charge had failed and the most optimistic Southerner knew that the Confederates had lost the day, General Lee, "the saddest man in the Army of Northern Virginia," passed among his retreating, exhausted men, begging them to keep their ranks and assuring them: "It was my fault this time." He saw an aide lashing at a balky horse and begged: "Oh, don't do that. I once had a foolish horse and I found gentle measures so much the best." Sir Arthur Fremantle found Confederate General Longstreet sitting glumly on a fence and said tactlessly: "I wouldn't have missed this for anything." Replied the beaten general: "I would like to have missed it very much."

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