How we cite our quotes: (Part.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #10
Chamberlain closed his eyes, slept again. Opened them and lost all sense of time, had been sleeping since Noah in the sound of the guns, had slept through the mud and the ooze, and the thousands of days since Creation, the guns going on forever like the endless rains of dawn. The earth was actually shuddering. It was as if you were a baby and your mother was shuddering with cold. (4.3.54)
As he survives that huge artillery bombardment before Pickett's Charge, Chamberlain imagines the war as a calamity convulsing the earth, which is like a pregnant mother. It seems to last forever. But Chamberlain has already gone through his own climactic fight at Little Round Top—he's mainly an observer during this part of the battle. The imagery of baby and mother shuddering in the cold strengthens the feeling of violence in this scene and reminds us of some of the human costs of war.