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[205]

‘But while life lasts, to fight’ Such was the fate of many of the 5,000 and more Confederates of whom no returns were made after the fighting at Gettysburg. This young soldier was one of the sharpshooters posted in the ‘Devil's Den,’ the only position captured and held by the Confederates in the fighting at the Round Tops. In their lonely fastness these boys in gray sent many a swift messenger of death into the Federal lines that were fighting on the near-by crest. Then at last a Federal shell, bursting over this lad, wounded him in the head, but was not merciful enough to kill him outright. He was evidently able to spread his blanket and must have lain there alone for hours in his death agony. The photographer who took this picture, just after the battle in July, attended the dedication of the National Cemetery at Gettysburg, in November, and again penetrated to this rocky spot. The musket, rusted by many storms, still leaned against the rock; the remains of the boy soldier lay undisturbed within the mouldering uniform. No burial party had found him. The only news that his loved ones got was the single word, ‘Missing.’ A tale like this is true for 5,000 more.

 

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