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glorious outrage. I’ve had enough damned rain to make me puke.
    His nearby comrades laughed, despite the torrent pounding them. Bettelman’s outbursts of indignation at every aspect of army life were so dramatic and sudden that that they enlivened the grimmest march. And this march was wretched.
    â€œAn hour since, you complain about the heat,” Heisler reminded him. Shaking the wet from his neck and face, he added, “You want to be cold. You get rain. Now you don’t like the rain.”
    â€œIt’s the mud I don’t like,” Bettelman replied. “I am not made for the insane life of a soldier. I’m a watchmaker. I am not made for this.”
    But he was made for it. Corporal Friedrich Schwertlein had seen Bettelman stand on the field of Chancellorsville, as steady as the statue of a warrior, face blackened with powder and jaw set, firing calmly into the Rebels as they came on screaming. The regiment had stood its ground, even after Colonel Krzyzanowski ordered them to withdraw. They had stood, and fought, and bled as the army collapsed around them. Only to read in the newspapers that every one of the Germans, “the Flying Dutchmen” of the Eleventh Corps, had run away, a vile disgrace to the Union. But the 26th Wisconsin had not run. Not even when half their number lay dead and bleeding, with fires devouring the brush around them and the Confederates hurling themselves forward through the undergrowth, maddened by the unexpected resistance. Schwertlein himself had stood his ground as well. Telling himself, Rastatt nie wieder! Never again a surrender such as Rastatt.
    Rastatt was far away now. Across an ocean. Fourteen years gone. But the fight was the same. Prussian princes then, slavemonger aristocrats now. Another desperate battle to save a republic. Another chapter in the universal struggle for freedom.
    Fritz Schwertlein certainly did not consider himself a nationalist. The day would come when nations would disappear in the recognition that all men were brothers. Yet, it burned in him, as it did in every man still marching under the regiment’s colors, to hear all Germans derided as cowards. In the battle each man sensed ahead, it would not be “Rastatt never again!” but “Never another Chancellorsville!” This time, it would be different, their reputation would be redeemed.
    The rain halted as suddenly as it had begun, leaving a mire through which the men had to struggle. Some lost their shoes and cursed, while others fell out to remove and save their footwear. More than a few already had collapsed from the heat and strain. The march seemed endless.
    â€œWie weit noch?” Bettelman whined. How much farther?
    Roused by the question, Heisler asked Schwertlein, “Do you think we are in Pennsylvania, Fritz?”
    â€œNo,” Schwertlein told him. “Emmitsburg is in Maryland. We have not come to Emmitsburg. After that is Pennsylvania.”
    To their rear, a commotion rose. Horses complained and hot voices commanded: “Give way there! Get out of the way!”
    Accustomed to their fate, Schwertlein and his fellow Germans stepped to the side of the road, seizing the excuse for a few minutes’ rest. Their clothing steamed.
    As the limbers, guns, and caissons neared, the soldiers stepped back deeper into the brush. Even so, great splashes of mud reached them. Low Irish by the look of them, the gunners ignored the foot soldiers as they whipped their horses through the clinging slop.
    â€œIf they stick and ask me to help, I don’t help them no more,” Bettelman muttered. Then he reconsidered and added, “Perhaps I am better to be an artilleryman? To ride so? Better than this verschweinte Infanterie .”
    The last caisson sloshed by, leaving knee-deep traces and long puddles amid the slime. Some fellow attempted to raise a song, but the mood was too disheartened. With the rain blown off, the heat punched back through the