Splinters exploded as another round struck a wheel of a neighboring gun, parts of the fennel and spokes scything across the field, the fennel literally tearing a man in half at the middle.
He started to ride down the line, ignoring the scream of incoming shells, carefully examining each crew at work, chewing out a battery commander for not taking the time to try and aim. The smoke was beginning to build up into a billowing cloud that cloaked the entire ridge, the occasional puff of breeze driving it along the slope. At times it was so thick he could barely see twenty feet, the men working around him looking like fiends in some infernal nightmare as they ran back and forth, brilliant flashes of light marking the discharge of each gun.
It was getting hot, the heat radiating off the barrels, the choking sulfurous smoke, the damp air the gutted ruins of a caisson burning, shells bursting overhead.
He spared a quick glance back across the open fields on the reverse slope. The infantry, close to forty thousand men, were down, lying in the tall grass, trampled corn and wheat fields, their dark lines spread across dozens of acres. They were starting to take the brunt of it now. Typical of rebel gunners, they were shooting high, trying to hit the narrow silhouette of a target along a higher crest. Off by even a fraction of a degree and the shot winged by, ten, twenty feet overhead, only to plunge down into the fields a quarter, even a half mile away. The men, in general, were protected by the reverse slope, but enough shells were detonating, or coming down on a high-enough arc, to hit the lines.
It was all becoming silent to him; the continual crack of artillery was deafening him. He couldn't hear their screams, but he could see the stretcher bearers running back and forth, carrying their bloody burdens to the rear.
He looked back toward the roiling clouds of yellow-green smoke, so thick that it would eddy and swirl as shot shrieked back and forth through it I only hope they're getting hit far worse, he thought grimly. My God, this has to do it.
9:30 A;M.
Longstreet finally accepted the inevitable and went into the trench, his staff pushing in after him. There was no sense in getting killed in this, he realized. Two of his orderlies were already wounded, one with a leg blown off.
The infantry around him nodded in recognition, one of them grinning. 'Too hot out there for ya, General?"
Pete said nothing, just offered a grin. Leaning up against the parapet, he trained his field glasses on the area below. It was hard to see. Everything was cloaked in smoke every bit as thick as the morning mist
The noise was beyond anything he had ever experienced. His own batteries were pouring it back, unmindful of ammunition spent. The captured Union supplies at Westminster guaranteed that for the first time in the war, the Confederate artillery could fire more intensely and longer than its Union counterpart Alexander finally had a chance to fight an artillery duel without rationing out each round and counting each minute of the engagement against a dwindling supply of ammunition. The effect was amazing to Confederate soldiers used to absorbing more than they hit with the artillery arm. The opposite slope was barely visible in the gloom. The only way to mark the battery position was by the continual ripple of flashes racing along the crest of the slope.
A shot came screaming in, men ducking, a spray of mud and dirt washing into the trench, covering Pete. Spitting, he stood up, pulling out a handkerchief to wipe the lenses of his field glasses.
Another shot tore past and he heard anguished cries. From the corner of his eye he saw a body collapsing, the man decapitated, comrades crying out in fear and anger.
Looking beyond the dead man, he saw Porter emerging from the smoke, on foot crouched and running low. Venable stood up, shouting for Porter to come over. The artilleryman slid into the trench, breathing hard.
"How goes it?" Pete asked.
'Twelve guns with Cabell and Poague's battalions are wrecks, sir, guns dismounted, a couple of hundred horses dead; casualties with those batteries are high. Looks like they had every gun aimed at them first. Should I get them out?’
Pete shook his head.
"I want them to stay," his words cut short by an airburst exploding nearly straight overhead. "Sir?"
"I want them to stay."
Porter looked at him, as if ready to voice an objection.
"All this smoke, they can barely see. Tell the surviving gunners they must keep firing."
"It will be a slaughter," Porter objected.
"It will be a slaughter wherever their fire is directed. That's Hunt over there, Porter. He knows counterbattery. You pull out and he'll shift fire to the next target I want you to keep those men at it"
"Yes, sir."
"Ammunition?"
"More than enough. I have reserve caissons and an ammunition train a mile back. I'll begin to move them up when we need them."
"Just make sure you have plenty of canister in reserve."
"We will."
"Keep at it Porter."
The gunner wearily stood up and ran back down the line into the middle of the storm.
The fire continued to thunder and roll, reverberating off the hills, the earth beneath Pete shaking and trembling.
9:50 AM, JULY 4,1863 WASHINGTON, D.C. THE WHITE HOUSE
Abraham Lincoln stood alone, looking out the window. The traffic on Pennsylvania Avenue was still this morning. It was, after all, a day of observation
and celebration. Word had just been publicly announced confirming that this day Vicksburg was surrendering to Grant A great salute was planned for this evening, a discharge of a hundred blank rounds of artillery at Lafayette Square.
No one's mind was on that now. A runner from the War Department had just come in bearing a telegram from Baltimore, declaring that heavy gunfire was clearly audible to the northwest toward Westminster.
There was no need for that report Putting his hand on the windowpane, Lincoln could feel the vibration from over sixty miles away.
10.15am UNION MILLS
"Hunt is there any sign this is achieving anything?"
Henry, ears ringing, did not know what to say.
Meade stood expectant hands on hips, both instinctively ducking as a round, one with a high-piercing scream, snapped past. Several gunners nearby looking up, exclaiming that it was a Whitworth bolt.
"I cannot say, sir. The smoke. You can't see."
Henry waved toward the south. The swirling, eddying canopy completely obscured the valley and the slopes of the hill, mingling in with pillars of smoke rising from burning caissons, wagons, and several of the houses in the town hit by the Confederate counterfire.
The gunners moved like men seized with a terrible palsy, convulsively, gesturing wildly, typical of men who had been delivering a sustained barrage for well over a hour, crews manhandling the one-ton pieces back into place after each shot rammers covered in black filth, loaders gasping for air in the thick fumes. A hundred or more dead horses littered the ground behind the pieces, cut down by solid shot shrapnel, splinters from exploding caissons, and shattered field pieces.
Everything around the guns was churned to mud, the recoil from firing each piece eighty times or more having dug the earth up into a sticky mess.
Injuries were mounting, men hit by shell and explosions, caught momentarily unaware and crushed as a gun recoiled, kicked by panic-stricken horses, impaled by splinters bursting from limbers shattered by solid bolts.
Behind the lines, the infantry continued to endure, curled up on the open slope, but staying in place. If anything they were far safer than trying to make, a run for the rear because the shot skimming the ridge was plunging down behind the lines.