Gettysburg
Picture this:
It is the beginning of July. 1863.
This is Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
We’re on the battlefield.
It’snow close to midnight on a day that has been scorchingly hot. The last three days have been scorchingly hot with no rain, but now it’s close to midnight, and for the last twelve hours it has been raining.
You can hear in the distance, thunder is rolling. And you see occasional big flashes.
The rain is coming down. Flashes of lighting are occurring.
You are standing at the bottom of the hill looking up a long ridge all the way to the top of the hill.
As you look up that giant sweep, all the way up to the top of the ridge, you can see hundreds of thousands of bodies,Confederate, Union bodies lying on the hill, horses lying on the hill.
There’s no moon, so you can see it in the flash of the lighting.
With the rain coming down, you begin to see that this field in front of you has all those bodies littered where there once was green grass, rolling hills...now it has trenches, now it has huge ruts, now it has huge holes in it, big boulders and stones are sticking out.
You can see overturned cannons. You can see bodies lying in and out of the holes and the trenches. You see mutilated bodies. You see body parts. You see bodies without parts. You can see bodies exploding, rupturing in the night.
As you look up that vast expanse of that hill and hear that rain coming downin that heat, in that humidity,you know that these bodies ore being soaked where they were overheated all day long.
And you can see the blood beginning to seep into the trenches, into the ruts in the ground. You can see trees. Those tall trees that are now sheared off from all the explosions,trees that have bullet holes in them. The branches are all sheared off. You can see fire and scorch marks on the barks of the trees. You can see trees that are totally overturned and uprooted.
Notice as you look up that hill, you see little lights dancing all the way up the sweep of that hill.
If you look closely in the lightning, you can see that in the sweep of that hill, those lights are little lanternsand they’re moving and dancing.
These are the hospital attendees, the hospital orderlies. As they’re walking around, Union and Confederate, they’re attending to the bodies, holding the lanterns over bodies to see if anybody’s still alive. And if they’re still alive, then they’re going to be carried off in a stretcher.
Now we’re at the bottom of that hill.
We’re just at the edge of the forest tree line.
You can see and you can definitely hear the Confederate troops…beginning to retreat.
You can hear them in the mud. You can hear the horses in the mud. You can hear them trying to wheel the heavy artillery through the mud and the ruts over the stones trying to be as silent as possible as they work their way backwards through the trees in their retreat towards the river.
They’re trying to move away as quickly as possible to get to the river and get to the other side. That Confederate army is probably about one-third the size of the army that was there two days ago.
Way up at the top of the ridge, you can see the Union troops still dug in their trenches...trying to see through the darkness and through the lightning to hear what’s going on: Is this the Confederate troops retreating...trying to be silent, through the mud and the blood and the bone, retreating?
And finally in this quietness of the retreat with the roiling thunder, you know that the hour is approaching midnight.
And when the clock strikes midnight, the new day will be…the Fourth of July.