'the fearful pageantry'

The open hollow between the ridges was the great valley of the shadow of death, and when the smoke drifted up and spun away into misty fragments it was as if a curtain had gone up to reveal the stage of some terrible unimaginable theater. The Federal soldiers on the eastern ridge looked west; they were veterans and they had been in many battles, but what they saw now took their breath away. Some of them had seventy-five years yet to live and some of them had no more than ten minutes, but until they died they remembered the scene that now presented itself. There it was, for the last time in this war, perhaps for the last time anywhere, the fearful pageantry and color of war in the old style, beautiful and majestic and hideous; fighting men lined up in double and triple ranks, a solid mile from flank to flank, slashed red flags overhead, sunlight glinting off polished musket barrels—the flower of Lee's army coming forward, unhurried ...

—Bruce Catton, Gettysburg: The Final Fury (1974)