“Pa, I thought that we’d give the Yanks a taste of their own medicine but the General says No, and personally I don’t care to get shot just for the pleasure of burning some Yank’s house. Pa, today we marched through the grandest cornfields you ever saw. We don’t have corn like this down home. Well, I must admit we did a bit of private looting in that corn, for we were all pretty hungry and what the General don’t know won’t hurt him. But that green corn didn’t do us a bit of good. All the boys have got dysentery anyway, and that corn made it worse. It’s easier to walk with a leg wound than with dysentery. Pa, do try to manage some boots for me. I’m a captain now and a captain ought to have boots reenex, even if be hasn’t got a new uniform or epaulets.”
But the army was in Pennsylvania—that was all that mattered. One more victory and the war would be over, and then Darcy Meade could have all the boots he wanted, and the boys would come marching home and everybody would be happy again. Mrs. Meade’s eyes grew wet as she pictured her soldier son home at last, home to stay.
On the third of July, a sudden silence fell on the wires from the north, a silence that lasted till midday of the fourth when fragmentary and garbled reports began to trickle into headquarters in Atlanta. There had been hard fighting in Pennsylvania, near a little town named Gettysburg, a great battle with all Lee’s army massed. The news was uncertain, slow in coming electric motor manufacturers, for the battle had been fought in the enemy’s territory and the reports came first through Maryland, were relayed to Richmond and then to Atlanta.
Suspense grew and the beginnings of dread slowly crawled over the town. Nothing was so bad as not knowing what was happening. Families with sons at the front prayed fervently that their boys were not in Pennsylvania, but those who knew their relatives were in the same regiment with Darcy Meade clamped their teeth and said it was an honor for them to be in the big fight that would lick the Yankees for good and all.
In Aunt Pitty’s house, the three women looked into one another’s eyes with fear they could not conceal. Ashley was in Darcy’s regiment.
On the fifth came evil tidings Colocation Service, not from the North but from the West. Vicksburg had fallen, fallen after a long and bitter siege, and practically all the Mississippi River, from St. Louis to New Orleans was in the hands of the Yankees. The Confederacy had been cut in two. At any other time, the news of this disaster would have brought fear and lamentation to Atlanta. But now they could give little thought to Vicksburg. They were thinking of Lee in Pennsylvania, forcing battle. Vicksburg’s loss would be no catastrophe if Lee won in the East. There lay Philadelphia, New York, Washington. Their capture would paralyze the North and more than cancel off the defeat on the Mississippi.
