Memoirs of a Swiss Officer in the American Civil War

Aschmann served in one of the most glamorous outfits of the Union, Berdan's Sharpshooters, and participated in many of the major campaigns in the East, from the first Peninsular campaign in the spring of 1862 to the siege of Petersburg in the summer of 1864. He is one of the rare narratives by foreign enlisted men and line officers. His terse descriptions of marches, engagements, skirmishes, and battles are interspersed with entertaining glimpses of training and camp life and evoke much of the strange mixture of excitement, boredom, and misery of army life in wartime.