THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
fighting, step by step, with great firmness. I said in my official report: “In this part of the action, which was almost a hand-to-hand struggle, officers and men showed the highest courage and determination. Our loss was extremely severe. The Second Brigade, Third Division, lost all its regimental commanders; several regiments nearly half their number in killed and wounded.” Among the mortally wounded was Colonel Mahler of the Seventy-fifth Pennsylvania, who had been a revolutionary comrade of mine in the German fortress of Rastatt, in 1849. Now with death on his face he reached out his hand to me on the bloody field of Gettysburg, to bid me a last farewell. I came out unscathed, but my horse had a bullet bole clean through the fatty ridge of the neck just under the mane.
It has been represented by some writers, Southerners, that the Union forces on the first day of the battle of Gettysburg were utterly routed and fled pell-mell into the town. This is far from the truth. That there were a good many stragglers hurrying to the rear in a disorderly fashion, as is always the case during and after a hot fight, will not be denied. Neither will it be denied that it was a retreat after a lost battle with the enemy in hot pursuit. But there was no element of dissolution in it. The retreat through the town was of course more or less disorderly, the streets being crowded with vehicles of every description, which offered to the passing troops exceedingly troublesome obstructions. It is also true that Eleventh Corps men complained that when they entered the town, it was already full of First Corps men, and vice versa, which really meant that the two corps became more or less mixed in passing through. It is likewise true that many officers and men, among others General Schimmelfennig, became entangled in cross streets, and alleys without thoroughfare, and
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