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314 Martens ill, buried him yesterday afternoon at 3 o’clock and, together with the Lister family, we paid him the last honors as he was laid to rest10 [12 ll.: grave; assets]. With sympathy and sorrow at the death of a man so young and so promising , I remain yours respectfully / Alexander Lemcke [. . .] Victory at Shiloh* came at a high price. This was particularly true for Petasch’s unit, the 55th Illinois, which occupied an exposed position in the front line. For two hours they held on, outnumbered by the enemy four to one, and only began an orderly retreat when they ran out of ammunition. Petasch also demonstrated the valor of a true veteran, as his superior officer mentioned in his casualty report: ‘‘Made every shot tell until taken from the field.’’ His Company B was the first to come under fire, and it suffered the heaviest casualties of the entire 55th, a regiment in which over half its troops were listed as dead, wounded, or missing—the second highest casualty rate among all the Union regiments in the battle. As the chronicle of the unit reports, the 55th Illinois suffered half of all the casualties it incurred during the entire war on that one day, within three hours.11 The romantic illusions of war, held by Petasch and many on both sides at the outset of the conflict, died in the rain and mud at Shiloh.12 10. The Listers had immigrated from England at least twenty years earlier and lived in rented quarters (obviously above their means) with another family. Mr. Lister was a bookseller with assets of only $300, but they employed three servants, and their two young daughters were listed as ‘‘ladies.’’ Letter-writer Lemcke was a ‘‘trader’’ from Hamburg. MC 1860: Vanderburg Co./Ind., Evansville, #15, #1191. 11. Story of the 55th (1887), 70–102, 125, 473–75, 519; Hicken (1991), 60–61, 70; Military File, P. Petasch, NatA. 12. McPherson (1982), 229. 38. Second Lieutenant Friedrich Martens In the spring of 1857 nineteen-year-old Friedrich Martens left his home in the village of Delve in Ditmarschen, near the Danish border, and traveled steerage to America. He probably wanted to avoid serving in the military, although the economic situation of his family may also have played a role in his decision to leave. His early letters also clearly indicate a certain thirst for adventure.1 source note: Martens’s spelling is frequently weak, and so is his grammar at times, though neither makes quick comprehension of his letters difficult. In terms of style, however, he is not only well versed in stereotypical metaphors but also uses quite original turns of phrase. Besides using well-known literary quotations, he also describes war experiences by drawing convincingly on historical precedent. Not included here are six letters in the series from the time before 1860. 1. HPL and NYPL, Donau, April 1–May 4, 1857; letter of May 17, 1857, NABS. Martens 315 Martens came from a family of small landholders, encumbered with debts, who possessed more intelligence than property. In one letter he wrote about the son of the local agriculture administrator in Delve, also an immigrant, noting that in Germany ‘‘he was looked up to, and I was dirt on the street in his eyes, and here it’s the other way around, because here nothing counts but education.’’ His own education cannot have been very systematic, although in addition to lessons in the local village school, he received private instruction from the deacon. Martens’s occasional errors in spelling and grammar stand out in stark contrast to his quotations from Heine and Schiller.2 A dense network of fellow countrymen surrounded Martens both on the way to America and after his arrival in Joliet, Illinois. In the passenger lists he appears as a ‘‘painter,’’ and within three days he had found a job with a painting company, Dorn and Schott, whose owners both had origins in the same area as Martens.3 As a result of the economic recession at the time, Dorn and Schott went bankrupt in October 1857. Martens first went to work for an American as a bartender, but he soon went together with a partner and opened his own saloon. He also seems to have worked for a while as a teacher. When the war broke out, he was living in Peoria, about a hundred miles south of Joliet.4 Despite all the...

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