Domo Visits the Historic Battlefield at Gettysburg

By Ernest Hilbert • November 2, 2009 • Domokun, Feature

Domo wants to see the site of Pickett’s famous charge. William Faulkner wrote of that fateful hour:

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armstead and Wilcox look grave yet it’s going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago . . . .

On the third day of battle, Lee approved a bold frontal assault up Cemetery Ridge against the center of the Union line, where they believed the guns had been silenced by Confederate artillery. The Union gunners had merely paused to allow their cannons to cool, so when the gray ranks reached the top of the ridge, they found . . .

Domo asks can’t we all just get along?

Oh, the sun is setting. Domo is roaming in the gloaming. What better time to visit the haunted Devil’s Den, where Confederate sharpshooters held out in an outcropping of massive igneous rock boulders for two days.