Chamberlain had been a soldier barely nine months, yet his grasp of tactics was already remarkable. Seeing that his rear was critically exposed, under fire he ordered his officers to shuffle the regiment’s entire line leftwards, curling back among the boulders along the south-east face of the hill. He thus doubled 20th Maine’s front, at the cost of thinning its ranks. His new disposition formed an arrowhead with the regiment’s colours on a rock at the tip. The companies just had time to complete their difficult manoeuvre before a storm of shouting and musketry signalled the assault of five Confederate regiments. There were now two Union brigades on Little Round Top, under heavy attack and losing leaders fast – a brigadier and a colonel fell dead within minutes, and more officers soon followed.
Oates’s 15th Alabama had supposed the rear of the Union position to be undefended. As they sprang forward the last yards to the summit, they were shocked to meet a frenzy of fire from the left wing of Chamberlain’s positions. ‘Again and again was this mad rush repeated,’ wrote one of the Maine officers, ‘each time to be beaten off by the ever-thinning line that desperately clung to its ledge of rocks.’ Chamberlain said: ‘At times I saw around me more of the enemy than of my own men; gaps opening, swallowing, closing again with sharp, convulsive energy…All around, strain, mingled roars – shouts of defiance, rally and desperation.’ The Maine men were pushed back in places, yet somehow summoned the energy to recover their ground. Soldiers were tearing open cartridges with their teeth, ramming and firing like madmen. Some wrestled hand to hand with attackers. Chamberlain had thrown into the line every man he possessed, including the sick, cooks, bandsmen and even two former mutineers from 2nd Maine who had been held as prisoners. He sent the adjutant, his brother Tom, to reinforce the depleted colour guard.
The Confederates, exhausted after twenty-five miles of marching followed by this terrible encounter, fell back to regroup. Chamberlain walked among his men, supervising the gathering of dead and wounded, closing ranks and offering the reassurance of his calm presence. A shell fragment had gashed his right foot, while his left leg was bruised where a ball had smashed his scabbard against it. As the grey ranks of the 15th Alabama stumbled uphill once more through the trees, the colonel almost despaired of holding his ground. He begged for reinforcements, but succeeded only in persuading his neighbours of the 83rd Pennsylvania to take over a portion of 20th Maine’s right flank frontage.
A new crisis came as men began to cry ‘Ammunition!’ They had started the action with sixty rounds apiece. Almost all were gone, even after emptying the cartridge boxes of the dead and wounded.
Seeing some of his soldiers preparing to resist the Alabama’s charge with clubbed muskets, Chamberlain made the greatest tactical decision of his life. Calling ‘Bayonet! Forward!’ he ordered Captain Ellis Spear to lead the entire left wing of the regiment in a sweeping, wheeling charge downhill. The right wing held its ground until the regiment was aligned, then sprang forth also. The astounded Confederates checked, recoiled, then broke. One of the Alabaman officers fired his Colt at Chamberlain’s face before surrendering when he found the colonel’s sword at his throat. Many of the erstwhile attackers threw down their weapons and raised their hands. A Confederate attempt to make a stand before a field wall collapsed when from behind the stonework emerged Chamberlain’s detached B Company, firing on their rear. “We ran like a herd of wild cattle,’ a crestfallen Colonel Oates acknowledged. Two Confederate colonels, one badly wounded, surrendered. Chamberlain described how his regiment, ‘swinging like a great gate on its hinges’ down the lower slopes of Little Round Top, ‘swept the front clean of assailants’. Crossing the Union line at the base of the hill, the men of 20th Maine were eager to press on, but Chamberlain checked them beneath the frontage of the 44th New York. After two hours in action he had only some two hundred men left, and he could see the Texas and Alabama survivors rallying. It is a remarkable tribute to his powers of command that he was able to muster his soldiers and redeploy them on the summit of Little Round Top. Having commenced the action 358 strong, they had lost forty killed and ninety wounded. In addition to the casualties inflicted on Lee’s men, they had taken four hundred prisoners.
Both friend and foe paid handsome tribute to Chamberlain’s achievement, which each perceived as the decisive action of Gettysburg. Colonel Oates of the 15th Alabama said: ‘There never were harder fighters than the 20th Maine men and their gallant colonel. His skill and persistency and the great bravery of his men saved Little Round Top and the Army of the Potomac from defeat.’
And the day was not yet done. Early in the long summer evening, Chamberlain and his new brigade commander – Strong Vincent had been mortally wounded – discussed the chances of regaining Big Round Top while the Confederates were reeling. They were fearful that the enemy might yet regain the advantage by deploying artillery on its height. A newly-arrived brigade of Pennsylvania reservists was invited to undertake the recapture of the hill. Its commander declined, and Chamberlain was given the job. Contemplating his exhausted band of survivors, he recalled, ‘I had not the heart to order the poor fellows up.’ Instead, he said simply: ‘I am going, the colors will follow me. As many of my men as feel able to do so can follow us.’ Drawing his sword, he set off, and of course the 20th Maine went after him.
Still lacking ammunition, they deployed in a single line, bayonets forward. Around 9 p.m., in deepening darkness, they scrambled wearily, silently uphill through the trees, fearful of premature detection. As they approached the crest, however, they met only desultory fire. The Confederates fled. With a handful of casualties, the 20th Maine secured the position and called for ammunition. The Pennsylvania reserve brigade was now sent up to provide support. Yet when its regiments encountered Confederate fire, they turned and fled. Further reinforcements eventually arrived during the night. At noon next day, Chamberlain’s little force was relieved and sent into reserve. As the Maine men marched back, the brigade commander seized their leader’s hand: ‘Colonel Chamberlain,’ he said, ‘your gallantry was magnificent, and your coolness and skill saved us.’ On 3 July, while the regiment endured some heavy shellfire, it was not engaged. Meade’s victory rendered almost a third of both sides’ combatants casualties, but Confederate losses were proportionately higher – twenty-eight thousand dead, wounded and missing, to the Union’s twenty-three thousand. Lee’s daring invasion of the North had failed, and could never be renewed.
Soldiers, like the rest of us, are sometimes ungenerous about the achievements of their peers. Yet from highest to lowest, the Union’s men applauded the achievement of Chamberlain and the 20th Maine, which made up a fraction of 1 per cent of Meade’s army. Ames, the regiment’s old commander, swelled with proprietary pride, and wrote to Chamberlain to say so. What Chamberlain had done reflected not merely courage, but imagination, leadership and tactical gifts of the highest order. A professional soldier, steeped in the craft of war, might have been proud to display such speed of thought on a battlefield. Instead, this was the achievement of a rank amateur, a man who had known nothing of soldiering a year before, indeed had intended himself for a cultural pilgrimage among the cathedrals and monuments of Europe. For his deeds at Little Round Top, Chamberlain was later awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. ‘We are fighting gloriously,’ he wrote to Fannie. ‘Our loss is terrible, but we are beating the Rebels as they were never beaten before. The 20th has immortalised itself.’ On 4 July he led his regiment back to the battlefield to bury their dead, each man’s place signified by a marker formed from an ammunition box. He also visited the wounded, some of whom he was distressed to find suffering in the open, beneath rain now falling heavily. Then Meade led his divisions away, on a deplorably leisurely pursuit of Lee’s beaten army.
For some soldiers, that July day in Pennsylvania would have represented the summit of military achievement, a supreme exertion never to be repeated. Several of the men portrayed in this book achieved their reputations in a single brush with glory. Even if Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain had never again done anything of note as a soldier, he would be remembered for Little Round Top. Yet this proved only the first notable experience of an extraordinary Civil War career.
In August he succumbed