One is John Erhardt (1790-1880), who was drafted into the French army in 1806 at age 16. When Napoleon invaded Spain in 1808, he reluctantly went along, only to be captured and imprisoned by the British.

Erhardt threw his lot in with his enemies, and when the War of 1812 broke out, they shipped him to Canada. There he deserted, this time to the Americans, and after that war ended, he settled in New York.

Finally, in 1848, he retired to Osceola, southeast of Fond du Lac, where he found that one of his neighbors was a Scotsman named William Stewart.

Stewart (1790-1879) had enlisted in the British army in 1809 and gone to Spain to fight against Napoleon's invasion. He was wounded five times, including once when he and a French soldier bayoneted each other in hand-to-hand combat. His adversary died, but Stewart recovered and was sent to Canada.

When his term of enlistment expired in 1823, he crossed the border and enrolled in the U.S. Army. Stewart was stationed at Fort Howard in Green Bay from 1827 to 1835, and in 1840 he settled on a farm in the town of Empire, southeast of Fond du Lac.

The two neighbors were astonished to discover that they had faced each other in one of history's greatest military campaigns, almost 40 years earlier and 4,000 miles away.

- Wisconsin Historical Society www.wisconsinhistory.org

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