THE CONFEDERATE RETREAT FROM GETTYSBURG.

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moving under my convoy on the Chambersburg road. These 17 guns andMcClanalian’s 6 guns gave us 23 pieces in all for the defense of the trains.

Shortly after noon of the 4th the very windows of heaven seemed to haveopened. The rain fell in blinding sheets; the meadows were soon overflowed,and fences gave way before the raging streams. During the storm, wagons,ambulances, and artillery carriages by hundreds—nay, by thousands—wereassembling in the fields along the road from Gettysburg to Cash town, in oneconfused and apparently inextricable mass. As the afternoon wore on thereWas no abatement in the storm. Canvas was no protection against its fury,and the wounded men lying upon the naked boards of the wagon-bodies weredrenched. Horses and mules were blinded and maddened by the wind andWater, and became almost unmanageable. The deafening roar of the mingledsounds of heaven and earth all around us made it almost impossible to com-municate orders, and equally difficult to execute them.

About 4 p. M. the head of the column was put in motion near Cashtown,a ml began the ascent of the mountain in the direction of Chambersburg. Iremained at Cashtown giving directions and putting in detachments of gunsai| d troops at what I estimated to be intervals of a quarter or a third of a mile.If Was found from the position of the head of the column west of the moun-fmn at dawn of the 5th — the hour at which Young’s cavalry and Hart’sbattery began the ascent of the mountain near Cashtown — that the entirecolumn was seventeen miles long when drawn out on the road and put111 motion. As an advance-guard I had placed the 18th Virginia Cavalry,Colonel George W. Imboden, in front with a section of McClanahan’s battery.