Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume One).djvu/237

 hour or so the master dismissed me, saying: “The next lesson you will get on the march.” He was right; the constant exercise in active service gave me a pretty firm seat.

The sudden necessity of retreating considerably increased the general confusion. There was no end of orders and revocations of orders until we finally got started. I think it was in the night from the 13th to the 14th of June. With our artillery we had, indeed, no great difficulty, inasmuch as it consisted of very few pieces. At two o'clock in the night we mounted our horses and were off. A night march is almost always a miserable affair, especially a night march in retreat. Yet I must confess that the dull rumble of the wheels on the road, the rustle of the marching columns, the low snorting of the horses, and the rattling of the sabers and scabbards in the darkness, affected me as something especially romantic. In the appreciation of this I found sympathetic response with the wife of my chief, Mathilda Franciska Anneke, a young woman of noble character, beauty, vivacity, and fiery patriotism, who accompanied her husband on this march. I remember well our common pleasure, when in that night we passed by a tavern on the roadside, where some of the men, bearded fellows with black hats covered with plumes, and fantastically ornamented blouses, their rifles hung over their shoulders, in the feeble flicker of a lamp crowded around the woman of the hostelry, who poured wine for them. The picture might have been a scene of Schiller's “Robbers.” The majority of our men not being uniformed, every soldier dressed more or less according to his fancy, and this gave tempting scope to individual taste. Many of the men evidently endeavored to look very wild and terrible, which they would have done had their faces not been so strikingly good-natured.