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threaten and command.
They are obliged to fall back upon the second line.
Hall's right, overlapped, has to sag back, swaying to the rear because of the pressure, but swaying forward again as the ocean surges against a rock.
Regimental organization is lost, ranks are eight or ten deep,—pushing struggling, refusing to yield, but almost impotent for good.
A gap opens between Webb and Hall for a brief instant, at the time when there was a sudden lull in the firing of the cannon.
Woodruff, Brown, Cushing, Rorty and every other commissioned officer, almost without exception, of their respective batteries is dead or disabled.
Gen. Gibbon, commanding the division is also wounded.
Gallant Alex. Hayes, stripped to his shirt, is yelling down his line and a regiment of Ewell's corps, entangled with his force, passes captive to the rear.
‘Mallon! We must move!’
shouts Col. Devereux to his friend, the commander of the Forty-Second New York.
Just then a headlong rush of horses' feet, spurred to the utmost, comes up the hollow from behind, from the direction of Baltimore Pike.
There, looking the very embodiment of the God of War rides ‘Hancock the Superb.’
He nearly tramples upon the men of the Nineteenth.
His horse is thrown upon his haunches and just then Col. Devereux cries out to him:—‘See!
Their colors!
They have broken through!
Shall I get in there?’1
Shouting in a characteristic manner—‘Now, men, forward!
Now's your chance.
Get up and go at them!’—Gen. Hancock shoots like an arrow past the men, and a moment afterward receives a wound which sweeps him from the saddle and nearly costs him his life.
1 From General Hancock's Official Report:
‘The fight here became very close and deadly. The enemy's battleflags were soon seen waving on the stone wall. Passing at this time, Colonel Devereux commanding the 19th Massachusetts volunteers, anxious to be in the right place, applied to me for permission to move his regiment to right and to the front, where the line had broken. I granted it, and his regiment, and Colonel Mallon's 42d New York volunteers, on his right, proceeded there at once.’
Salem Press. Co., Salem, Ma., 1906.
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