DOCUMENT: WILLIAM FAULKNER

If the Battle of Gettysburg was the turning point of theCivil War, the beginning of the end for the Confederacy, thenPickett's Charge, the climax of three days fighting involvinga theretofore unparalleled assembly of men and material, wascertainly one of the war's defining moments. The open-fieldassault on Cemetery Ridge by some 15,000 men was one of thewar's largest actions and one of its bloodiest. Following aConfederate victory at Chancellorsville that had much revivedthe hopes of the South, Lee's invasion of the North with thereinforced Army of Northern Virginia offered the promise ofa victory that could preserve the Southern way of life by promptingrecognition of the Confederacy by the United Kingdom and France.These hopes and the enduring romantic version of the Southerncause that remains a part of the South's cultural memory areevocatively captured in this excerpt from Intruder in theDust, by William Faulkner. For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but wheneverhe wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet twooclock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in positionbehind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woodsand the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Picketthimself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one handprobably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waitingfor Longstreet to give the word and it's all in the balance,it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet, it not onlyhasn't begun yet but there is still time for it not to beginagainst that position and those circumstances which made moremen than Garnett and Kemper and Armstead and Wilcox look graveyet it's going to begin, we all know that, we have come toofar with too much at stake and that moment doesn't need evena fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this timewith all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania,Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself tocrown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperategamble, the cast made two years ago; or to anyone who ever sailedeven a skiff under a quilt sail, the moment in 1492 when somebodythought This is it: the absolute edge of no return, toturn back now and make home or sail irrevocably on and eitherfind land or plunge over the world's roaring rim. Source: William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust (1948).