Read the Esquire Gettysburg Reenactment series in its entirety here.
And now the armies are closing upon one another. Their leading edges are coming together, drawn in the same direction by the tyranny of terrain and the road network.
It is probably easiest to visualize this if you think of Gettysburg as the hub of a clock. Spread in an arc all the way from the Susquehanna River at about the one o'clock position, back to the west at Carlisle Barracks, which is at roughly twelve o'clock, and then moving in a smooth single line to the eleven and ten, then the nine and eight o'clock positions, that is the rebel army. The United States Army is coming in, somewhat confusingly, from the seven o'clock through the six o'clock, to about the four o'clock positions. And the roads put just one place at the center, Gettysburg.
Coming into Pennsylvania was, for many of the American troops, a welcome respite. Here, for almost the first time since they had left their homes and come to preserve the United States, the locals were nearly universally welcoming. And many of these soldiers had been away from home and a friendly face for a long time.
There was, in the First Corps (I Corps, in military marking), a particular brigade which was especially far from home. Made up of men from the "West," which back then meant exotic Indiana, Michigan and Wisconsin, this brigade was known throughout both armies. They were the Iron Brigade, or, in the words of some of their opponents, "Them damned fellers in the black hats."
And black hats they did wear. Significantly different than almost the entire rest of the Army of the Potomac, this one brigade wore the black "Hardee Hat." That was the regular dress hat of the professional United States Army, and it looked sort of like a cross between a top-hat and a cowboy hat. They wore this particular hat because at one point, about a year and a half earlier, the Iron Brigade had a Regular Army officer as their commander. In many ways that single officer deserves the credit for shaping the men of this brigade into the hard-core soldiers and nearly legendary unit that they were, already, by mid-1863. We will meet him again at Gettysburg in a few days. Though he has been promoted up and out of the Iron Brigade by this point, he is still making good men into hard men. His name was John Gibbon, and he was a hard man himself. But the men, well, they were still men.
On this day, 28 June, the men of the Iron Brigade were marching towards Gettysburg. Then the lead regiment of the brigade passed a young woman waving an American flag in her front yard. She was described as being, "about 20," and we can infer a little about her looks by what happened next.
The commander of the lead regiment, a man named Rufus Dawes, is riding with his staff at the head of the column. He inclines his men and they all tipped their hats and bowed to her as they passed her prosperous farmhouse. Then the first company of the infantry and the second company, trooped by and just stared in amazement as the young beauty waved her American flag, an audience of one for these men marching towards the enemy.
But by the time the third company approached, a lieutenant took things into his own hands. Lieutenants sometimes do that, and sometimes they do it right.
Calling behind himself he brought his company to a more rigid form of marching, the sort usually used on parades not real road-marches. Then he ordered, "Company C, Right Shoulder, Shift, Arms!"
Essentially this was the same mass salute that a military unit would give to a general or the President of the United States when marching past on a formal review up Pennsylvania Avenue. And then, following the inspired lead of Company C of the Sixth Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry Regiment, every, single, damned, company, in the whole rest of the First Brigade of the First Division of the First Corps of the Army of the Potomac, did exactly the same thing, for the same reason.
These were men. These were hard, hard men. Men made hard in the crucible of mere life in an agrarian society, in winter, in Wisconsin, Michigan and Indiana, before electricity or the internal combustion engine, and that was before they ever went to war. These were men who had lost more of their friends already than one can imagine. Blown apart at Antietam or shot down at Fredericksburg, these men had been in the thick of it and came out the far side every time. These were men, regardless of their physical ages, who had learned the hard way how obscene life can be.
And yet, for a few golden moments on 28 June 1863, when passing by a pretty girl on a sunny day, they collectively acted like a bunch of larking schoolboys.
Less than 96 hours of life remained for a sad percentage of those men. Out of the 1,885 men marching down the road that day -- saluting a pretty girl by the side of the road as though she were a dignitary -- some 1,153 of them would be killed, wounded, or captured before 100 hours were out. And believe me, you do not get called the "Iron Brigade," by both sides, because "captured" makes up a big part of your numbers. That one unknown girl to whom they collectively, in their hundreds, flirted while marching towards hell was probably the last pretty face many of them would ever see. So maybe we can forgive them their little breach of military custom and courtesy. They would pay, in truth, on the barrel-head when the time came.