78.

I thought we would have time to train, and devise special tactics for the use of vampires in wartime. We did not.

No one expected Gettysburg to happen. Neither side was prepared. Once it began, however, like a fire in a fallow field, it could not be stopped.

I was near Hagerstown with my rail car at the time the news came. I was on my way toward Pipe Creek, to join up with Meade’s army; a trap had been laid there, to draw Lee south again. Clearly Lee had failed to take the bait. My orders changed in a moment and I linked up with a troop train to take us across the border. I was not ready. My men, such as they were, were not ready.

It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. I moved about the troop train once we were under way and saw men praying, some wailing to the skies. They believed the End of Days had come. The soldiers knew this battle would be a “good ’un,” a last desperate fight to try to stop Lee before he could capture Philadelphia and force a peace. The men sang songs, “John Brown’s Body,” which I hadn’t heard since the great muster when all Washington was an armed camp, or the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” By God, it was stirring.

As we approached the little market town of Gettysburg the singing stopped abruptly. There was another sound, an abominable sound, an unbearable sound that rocked the train car beneath me, shifted the coffins back and forth in their racks. I had never heard real artillery fire before. I had not heard guns ring like bells and the earth roar as it was torn open. From twenty miles away the noise was loud enough to tear the breath out of my mouth. They say those guns were heard as far away as Pittsburgh.

—THE PAPERS OF WILLIAM PITTENGER