to buy on the spot pictures of the old-timers, especially when he himself could get into the scene? — and to our good fortune one of these cameramen hired as an assistant an eighteen-year-old college man-on-vacation named Philip Myers. Not long ago Mr. Myers wrote down his recollections of the great event.

“We went to Gettysburg late in June,” he wrote, “but by the time we arrived the town was overflowing with thousands of visitors. We considered ourselves fortunate to bivouac in the haymow of a barn on the edge of town.” This photographer took Devil’s Den for his base of operations, and a day of scrambling up and down the ponderous rocks in this area left the young collegian very tired at nightfall. But somehow it was impossible to go to bed; every night the two men sat in the door of the haymow and looked out at the tented city. Mr. Myers recalled it:

“One by one the lights in the tents were extinguished, the singing ceased and an eerie calm embraced the encampment. A brilliant moon created soft radiance as, at eleven o’clock, a bugler at nearby headquarters broke the silence with the hauntingly melancholy notes of Taps. When the last plaintive notes of that somber call had faded, he was followed by another trumpeter farther off, then by another still more remote, and another, until it was impossible to tell if the notes we heard were real or imaginary.”

Between the tourists and the veterans themselves the photographer and his helper put in a full day every day (and were the rest of the summer clearing up the backlog of developing and printing). There were two shots in particular that Mr. Myers remembered.

One was a cigar-smoking Yankee veteran who held his hand to his cheek while drawing on his stogie. Mr. Myers protested that this spoiled the photo by hiding most of his face, and the veteran explained. He himself had been on Little Round Top during the battle, but here he was in Devil’s Den, because “I want to see where that so-and-so who shot me must’ve been standin’.…” He went on:

“I’m a-fightin’ and a-yellin’ at the top of my lungs, when his bullet come along an’ catches me right in my mouth. But what with yellin’ my mouth is wide open, so it misses my teeth an’ comes outta my cheek. An’ when it heals, it don’t close up tight. There is still a little hole there. If I don’t plug it with my finger I don’t get no draft on my smoke.” He took a

deep puff and with lips tightly pursed blew smoke out through his cheek.

Mr. Myers’ other memorable picture came once when he was making the favorite shot—a Yank and a Reb standing with arms intertwined. (“I must have made a thousand exposures of it.”) A tall, stately Confederate with a great shock of wintry hair called two Union veterans to his side, placed his arms on their shoulders, and demanded a photograph. The photographer remarked that the big campaign hats shaded their faces and suggested that they take off their hats. The men complied, and the Reb ran his fingers through his hair.

“Son,” he said to the camerman with a courtly bow, “fifty years ago it was the blue and gray. Now it’s all gray.”

Unfortunately, almost all the pictures this photographer made have disappeared in the years since the reunion. (The pictures we reproduce here were taken by his competitors.) Although relations between former foes were harmonious, serious arguments did develop here and there.

“One of the more serious ones took place in a restaurant near the Jennie Wade House,” wrote Mr. Myers. “After violent words had been exchanged across the table, a Reb and a Yank had at each other, not with bayonets this time, but with forks. Unscathed in the melee of 1863, one of them — and I never learned whether North or South — was almost fatally wounded in 1913 with table hardware!”

Incidentally, Mr. Myers had feared that a good many of the old veterans would die during the encampment. The Army Quartermaster Corps apparently felt the same way, for it was reported to have stockpiled a considerable number of coffins. Fortunately, hardly any of these were needed. Old soldiers apparently are a tough breed.

…and we come at last to the afternoon of July 3, and the great re-enactment of Pickett’s charge, with thousands on thousands of spectators gathered all about, Union veterans on Cemetery Ridge, Southern veterans on Seminary Ridge to the west. Out of the woods came the Southerners, just as before well, in some ways just as before. They came out more slowly this time, and Mr. Myers saw a dramatic difference: “We could see, not rifles and bayonets, but canes and crutches. We soon could distinguish the more agile ones aiding those less able to maintain their places in the ranks.”

Nearer they came, until finally they raised that frightening falsetto scream. “As the Rebel yell broke out after a half century of silence, a moan, a gigantic sigh, a gasp of

unbelief, rose from the onlookers.”

So “Pickett’s men” came on, getting close at last, throwing that defiant yell up at the stone wall and the clump of trees and the ghosts of the past.

“It was then,” wrote Mr. Myers, “that the Yankees, unable to restrain themselves longer, burst from behind the stone wall, and flung themselves upon their former enemies. The emotion of the moment was so contagious that there was scarcely a dry eye in the huge throng. Now they fell upon each other — not in mortal combat, but re-united in brotherly love and affection.”

The Civil War was over.