Cain at Gettysburg by Ralph Peters

tall was both real and a shadow. A voice called to them. It belonged to his wife, but that couldn’t be. Even in his dream, he knew that his wife could not be present with his father. He had been happy in the dream at first, nearly ecstatic, but confusion marred it. His father had vanished and he could not find his wife, who was lost amid the boundlessness of the fields. He turned around at last to take his bearings, unsure if he were still a boy or grown. The manor house was gone, everything was gone, except the fields of wheat and rye and barley that stretched to infinity. He ran and ran, but could not find a refuge.
    Colonel Wlodzimierz Bonawentura Krzyzanowski awoke with a sense of immeasurable loss. The dream had been so rich and deep that it took him a moment to grasp hold of reality. He was not a child now, but a man. His wife was real, and she was in Washington. His father was long dead, the estate long since sold off to pay the family’s debts. His father had fought under Napoleon to revive the Polish state, had served on the plague-ridden march to Moscow and the horrid retreat, had given all he had, including his slight wealth, for his dream of Poland reborn, and he had failed. He had died in his son’s sixth year, killed by the sale of his ancestral home at the demand of his Poznan creditors, the firm of Wolff, Falk and Levin Koenigsberger.
    His dream of the fields beyond Roznowo had haunted Krzyzanowski for as long as he could remember. Those images had pursued him until he no longer knew if they had ever had any substance in reality. The real fields were not endless, of course, although they had stretched far across Pomerania’s flatlands. Did he remember the manor house correctly? Was the image of his father but a fantasy?
    The lands girdling Roznowo beckoned him, not the Prussian-regulated streets of Poznan, where an aunt and uncle had raised him along with their own brood after his mother left him, the least healthy of her children, at their door. He had spent most of his life, in Poland and then in America, in cities. Yet, his dreams always returned to rye and barley.
    He realized that he had been weeping. Tears often came when he dreamed about his father. He possessed not even a token of the man now, not a saber from Napoleon’s wars, not a button, not a signature on a countersigned paper acknowledging his debts. A world had vanished, its joys hunted to extinction.
    His father had died in 1830. The next year, Poland rose again, defying the Russians, Austrians, and Prussians who had enchained her. But the powers aligned against the Poles proved invincible again. Uncles Bogumil and Nemezy, brave men in the family tradition, disappeared into prison. Poverty crept up to their door and slipped in through the windows. Still, his aunt and his last free uncle did as much for him as they did for their own children. So he could grow and make his own futile gestures.
    He had been studying mathematics at the Lycée of St. Mary Magdalene when the next Polish rising came, in 1846. For two years, he had lived a secret life as one of Mieroslawski’s underground supporters. But Prussia’s agents knew all. The revolt failed everywhere, most bloodily in Ruthenia, where the Austrians turned Pole against Pole as the Swedes had done two hundred years before. By the time Krakow’s revolutionary government fell, ending yet another dream of freedom, Krzyzanowski was a refugee, keeping low in Hamburg, on his way to exile in America.
    His waking dream since then had been to return one day and liberate his country. But the struggle for freedom ran deep in his blood, far deeper than borders could limit. When the slave states seceded to maintain their realm of bondage, he had rushed to New York to raise a volunteer regiment of Polish and German exiles. He endured the infernal politicking for military appointments and the stealing away of recruits by other regiments better supplied with bounty money. He