Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Three).djvu/88

  for service as a soldier, and then would desert on the first favorable occasion, to play the same game again, at a different place and under a different name. The task of army-reorganization brought to the front the question what would be done with the Eleventh Corps. The conduct of the corps on the battlefield at Gettysburg should have silenced the voice of detraction which had malignantly pursued it ever since it had been made the scapegoat of the Chancellorsville disaster. To be sure, we had again had the misfortune of being opposed, on the first day, to a vastly superior force of the enemy, in an unfavorable position, and we had been beaten, together with the First Corps. But we had held our ground a considerable time in a terrible fight, which inflicted enormous losses upon us; and then, after a short but very difficult retreat through the streets of a town filled with all sorts of obstructions, we instantly re-formed our thinned ranks, ready to fight again. On the next two days our men endured the great cannonade with exemplary firmness, manfully repelled the attacks made upon them, and whenever ordered, rushed with alacrity to the points where aid was required. No troops could have done their duty better. The defamatory persecution of the Eleventh Corps might then have ceased. But it did not. The “foreign legion,” as it was dubbed, was to serve as a scapegoat again for the retreat of the First Corps from a battlefield which could no longer be held against overwhelming numbers. How far this campaign of slander would go in its absolutely unscrupulous disregard of the truth, and how tenaciously the original calumny was stuck to, appears from a description of the battle of Gettysburg published by General Charles King, an officer of the regular army, over thirty years after the event. There we are told that while in the first day's battle the First Corps was