A Gettysburg Moment

“In the Wheatfield a shell exploded and shattered my right leg to pieces and killed two of my comrades. I lay there a few minutes unconscious, and when I came to I was surrounded by the enemy, and an officer was standing over me with one foot on my wounded leg. I pleaded with him to step off my wounded leg. He said, in answer to my pleading, drawing his sword, ‘You D____ Yankee, I will cut your heart out,’ and as he raised his sword, a ball came from the direction of Little Round Top, cut him through the throat and he fell beside me dead.   

The rebs carried me from the range of their own batteries to a small knoll from which place, by raising on my left elbow, I was able to see Pickett’s…Charge [the next day]. All at once the smoke became so thick I was unable to see, but at last I heard our band play…then I knew we had won the victory.”

Twenty-one-year-old Jacob Cole, a private in Company A, the 57th New York, survived both Gettysburg and the war, thanks to someone who came to his rescue, whether they realized it or not, from the top of Little Round Top, a few hundred yards away.

--From The Story of a Regiment: The Military Services of the Fifty-Seventh New York Volunteer Infantry, Chapter XIII, p. 182.