The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara

. saw it all begin, saw the guns go off one by one, each one a split second after the last, so that there was one long continuing blossoming explosion beginning on the right, erupting down through the grove and up the ridge to the left like one gigantic fuse sputtering up the ridge. Armistead looked at his watch: 1:07. He could see shells bursting on top of the ridge, on the Union lines, saw a caisson blow up in a fireball of yellow smoke, heard wild cheering amid the great sound of the cannon, but then the smoke came boiling up the ridge and he began to lose sight. Pickett was in front of him, out in the open, waving his hat and yelling wildly. Longstreet sat on a fence rail, motionless, crouched forward. There was too much smoke to see anything at all, just Longstreet's back, black, unmoving, and Pickett turning back through the smoke with joy in his face, and then the Union artillery opened up. The first shells came down in the trees beyond them. Longstreet turned slowly and looked. Then they began coming down in the field back there, where the Division was. Armistead turned and ran back through the trees across the ridge.

The Division lay in the open fields beyond the ridge. They had been there all morning, out in the open, through the growing heat. There was no protection: knee-high grass, low stone walls, off to the left a low field of rye. The shells to come in on them and there was nothing to do but lie flat and hold the ground.