Freemantle, a lieutenant colonel of the British Coldstream Guards who was traveling with Gen. Lee’s staff, visited the Boy Battery in the chaos of battle on the field at Gettysburg, July 3, 1863.

The novel’s Sgt. Pease remembered Freemantle speaking to Private Tommy Bainbridge of Pease’s gun section, in a recreated conversation whose words are found in Robert K. Krick’s history, Parker’s Virginia Battery, C.S.A.