Cain at Gettysburg by Ralph Peters Read Free Book Online

trees that lined their route.
    Lieutenant Trenk rode up and dismounted beside them. He always walked with the men, mounting his horse only when he needed to reach regiment or brigade headquarters in a hurry. In the 26th, officers and men saw each other differently. Some had fought with Sigel all the way to Freiburg in ’49, and so many of them had been driven into exile after the failed revolutions in the Germanies that most viewed rank as a necessary evil on the path to a utopia of equals. They were not Prussians, that was the thing, but men from Baden and Hesse, from the Palatinate or the Lower Rhine. They could march as well as anyone and fight better than most. But they were civilized Germans, not slaves of the Junker tyrants beyond the Elbe.
    â€œWas neues, Herr Leutnant?” Heisler asked. “Any news?”
    â€œIt’s true about Meade. He’s in command now.”
    â€œAnother Englishman. So I think we lose again,” Bettelman commented.
    â€œWell, don’t say that to Colonel Kriz,” the lieutenant told him. “He doesn’t like talk of losing. And he’ll be riding up the column in a little while. Halt’s Maul, ja? ”
    â€œ Der Kriz is a good man,” Bettelman said. “I think he is really German, not a Pole.”
    â€œBettelman thinks every good man has to be German,” Heisler put in.
    â€œThe Poles are a mixed-up bunch, though,” the lieutenant observed. “You have their minor noblemen like Kriz, their szlachta . Some of them are educated men. And they’re brave beyond imagining. But the peasants live like animals, and they make no effort to improve themselves.”
    â€œSpoken like a true Hohenzollern,” Schwertlein told him. “I should run up and ask the band to play the ‘ Hohenfriedberger .’”
    â€œThe Lion of Rastatt roars!” Lieutenant Trenk laughed. “Come on, Fritz. You know what I say is true.”
    Schwertlein hid the sudden wound he felt. He had not been a lion at Rastatt. Not at the end, when the garrison surrendered and he hid in a woman’s cupboard while the Prussian officers rounded up the revolutionaries they later would shoot in a ditch below the walls. He had fought until that hour, though, in his angry, amateur’s way. It was only at the end that his nerve had failed him.
    Trenk’s mockery was meant in fun, of course. He knew only that Schwertlein had been at Rastatt, nothing more. The two men had befriended one another in their early days of exile in Milwaukee, before either realized that he had become American in his heart. Trenk, an advocate back in Konstanz, had been struggling to read the law in his new home, while Schwertlein, the younger by three years, had not yet found his vocation as a journalist. They had shared their dreams of a free, universal society, as well as the inevitable nostalgia of the immigrant, but not every detail of their pasts had come into the open. In America, you could edit your previous life like a newspaper article.
    When the regiment mustered in, the men had voted for Schwertlein as their lieutenant. But before a single shot was fired, he had proven inadequate to the task, an eternal observer of men, not a leader by nature. They had voted for him only because they had known his name from his newspaper columns. Trenk became the lieutenant and he stepped down to corporal, an arrangement better suited to them both. The embarrassment had been fleeting.
    â€œAnyway,” Schwertlein said as they marched along, “what does it matter? German, Pole, American? The only identity that matters is whether a man stands for a better world, or defends the old order. Krzyzanowski fought for a better future in Poland, and he fights for the same thing now.”
    â€œOur corporal’s reading us one of his columns,” Heisler joked.
    â€œScheisse,” Bettelman called out. “More artillery comes.”
    But it wasn’t another column