Chamberlain
- As the Union soldiers march, Chamberlain admires the landscape with its fields and orchards. One farmer is trying to sell milk at outrageous prices to the soldiers, who instead steal the milk and tell him to help build the government.
- When the soldiers reach Pennsylvania, crossing over from Maryland, the people get friendlier and start giving away food for free. A girl gives Chamberlain a free cake.
- Chamberlain dismounts from his horse and marches with everyone else, remembering the time when Tom, as a kid, spent the night alone in the cold Maine winter while everyone was searching for him.
- Tom explains to one of the men formerly from the Second Maine that their brigade commander used to be Dan Butterfield, who loved to write bugle calls. He wrote a bugle call specifically for his brigade so that they would know when they were being called.
- Tom also hums "Butterfield's Lullaby" in memory of Butterfield. It's another bugle call—this one would later become Taps.
- Joshua Chamberlain muses to himself that he can sort of sleep while marching, dreamily looking at the heels of the person or horse in front of him.
- Chamberlain thinks about how he loves waking up and seeing the business of the camp around him, getting ready for another day of marching. This leads to a darker memory of piling up dead bodies at the Battle of Fredericksburg and hearing the bullets hit them. While he doesn't love this fact, he thinks he feels extremely "alive" in combat.
- Chamberlain's thoughts turn to dark, cold Maine, and to his father. His father was a silent, hard man with a secret inner warmth.
- Chamberlain remembers reciting a line from Hamlet about how Man "in action" is "like an angel" for his Dad. The elder Chamberlain said Man must be a murdering angel—which inspired Chamberlain to give a speech at school on "Man: The Killer Angel," making his father proud.
- Chamberlain thinks about how he could feel at home anywhere on earth: it's all his world, and he feels like a citizen of it as a whole.
- We shift gears to Tom, who's telling someone about how the 20th Maine wasn't allowed to fight in the battle of Chancellorsville: they all got inoculations, which made them sick, so they just guarded telegraph wires during the battle.
- Chamberlain gets back on his horse when a soldier, Sergeant Tozier, advises him to. The brigade commander, General Vincent, rides with Chamberlain for a little, showing him the new brigade flag.
- As the men march onwards, Chamberlain can see hazy smoke from the still distant battle. The men almost stop but are ordered to keep moving.
- The men hear news about what happened so far in the battle: the Union held for a while before retreating a bit, and Reynolds was either injured or killed in the fight.
- As they go further, the people who come out to watch them seem even happier to see them, glad that these soldiers are coming to fight the Rebels. Some of the men fall over from exhaustion and need to be picked up.
- An officer stops by and claims that General McClellan—a general widely admired—has been re-appointed to run the whole army. At first Chamberlain believes him, but then he realizes this isn't true. The rumor still spreads, along with one that the Confederates are already winning the battle.
- At midnight, the soldiers finally reach Gettysburg and are allowed to sleep.