Page One News

The story was one of the best pieces of reporting to appear anywhere in the U.S. press last week. It was in the New York Times, credited to Correspondent Samuel Wilkeson, and carried the July 4 dateline under which it was written--from Gettysburg exactly a century ago. Times editors offered it as memorable reading for the kind of double anniversary marked by the U.S. last week, and played it on Page One. For through Wilkeson's eyes, the panorama of triumph and tragedy of civil war at its most crucial moment came alive again. Wrote Wilkeson: Blue & Grey. "The battle of Gettysburgh! I am told it commenced on the first of July, a mile north of the town, between two weak brigades of infantry and some doomed artillery and the whole force of the rebel army . . . We were not to attack but to be attacked . . . The ground upon which we were driven to accept battle was wonderfully favorable to us . . .It was in form an elongated and somewhat sharpened horseshoe, with the toe to Gettysburgh and the heel to the south. "Lee's plan of battle was simple. He massed his troops upon the east side of this shoe position and thundered on it obstinately to break it ... Unflinching courage and complete discipline of the army of the Potomac repelled the attack . . . The marvellous outspread up on the board of death of dead soldiers and dead animals--of dead soldiers in blue, and dead soldiers in grey--more marvellous to me than anything I have ever seen in war--are a ghastly and shocking testimony to the terrible fight of the Second corps that none will gainsay. That corps will ever have the distinction of breaking the pride and power of the rebel invasion . . .

"Every size and form of shell known to British and to American gunnery shrieked, whirled, moaned, whistled and wrathfully fluttered over our ground . . . Through the midst of the storm of screaming and exploding shells, an ambulance, driven by its frenzied conductor at full speed, presented to all of us the marvellous spectacle of a horse going rapidly on three legs. A hinder one had been shot off at the hock . . ." How You Are Envied. "Then there was a lull, and we knew that the rebel infantry was charging. And splendidly they did this work--the highest and severest test of the stuff that soldiers are made of. Hill's division . . . and Longstreet's came as the support, at the usual distance, with war cries and a savage insolence as yet untutored by defeat. They rushed in perfect order across the open field up to the very muzzles of the guns. But they met men who were their equals in spirit and their superiors in tenacity. There never was better fighting since Thermopylae than was done yesterday by our infantry and artillery . . ." In the end, the Union defenses held, and the rebels were sent into rout. For Timesman Wilkeson, there was glory, but little pleasure in victory. At the height of battle, he had found the crushed body of his son, 19-year-old Lieut. Bayard Wilkeson, a Union artillery man. "My pen is heavy," he wrote that night. "Oh, you dead, who at Gettysburgh have baptized with your blood the second birth of Freedom in America, how you are to be envied!"

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