The Army Mule and Other War Sketches Part 8

When the 'prentice musketeer shoulders his arquebus and intimates a design to charge bayonet, stand from under promptly. Delays are dangerous. Iscariot with his twelve pieces of discredited coin folded in his turban figured as a tight-rope dancer on the occasion of his very last appearance on any stage.

Tasteless and intangible was the kiss that was prematurely discharged in midair and never, never came. Even the joys of courts.h.i.+p suffer a temporary eclipse when Johnnie is found behind the sofa. Exasperating to a like degree is the humorous episode at which we dare not laugh, yet can not die. It is alleged that rural homes decorated with chromographic mottoes are largely responsible for the overcrowded state of the paresis wards in our asylums. How much of the phenomenal hereditary predisposition to recklessness which characterized the next generation after the war was attributable to the enforced repression of risibles at Dress Parade may never be definitely ascertained. This much we know: When the safety valve is strapped down, boilers are in danger. She who kindles fire with gasoline, and penetrates the undiscovered country by that illuminated route, leaves few to pity and none to praise. But the victim of an over-fermentation of merriment has sympathizers numerous as the fas.h.i.+ons of grandfather's hat.

When the young recruit, twenty per cent. pork, thirty per cent. beans, forty per cent. patriotism and ten per cent. soldier, stands up to be exhibited, and a score of his best girls, each compounded in five equal parts of beauty and brightness, grace, gush and giggle, gaze in ravenous, enraptured solicitude on the dreadful performance, with their steel walls of restraint riveted tightly around them,--well, the consequences are to be unquestionably counted in as a part of the general havoc of war.

Meantime Dress Parade goes on. The evolutions and involutions continue to revolve, until the tired recruits are threatened with serious affection in the yellow pine district of the lumber region. The manual of arms goes through all its ascensions and declensions, its conjugations and calamities. He who would follow all its ramifications must have a head on him like the learned pig. Arms are presented, shouldered, ordered, right-s.h.i.+fted, trailed and held aport. Bayonets are charged and fixed and clattered until their gleam threatens to scream. No such confusion has prevailed since Lot's wife was transformed into chloride of sodium. One third of the commands are unintelligible; another third are incapable of execution according to tactics; no two companies have been drilled alike; no three consecutive soldiers perform the same antic at the same time. No movement is attempted that does not yield mixtures of grief, drollery and exasperation, sufficing for the most miscellaneous requirement.

Meritorious attributes sometimes crop out in unexpected places--many a man conceals a bruised and bleeding heart beneath a porous plaster.

Humor and drollery develop. Still the routine goes on, nominally monotonous, but in reality miraculously diversified.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ... _No two companies have been drilled alike; no three consecutive soldiers perform the same antic at the same time_]

Arms are trailed, right-shouldered, presented, ordered; bayonets are fixed, unfixed, or transfixed; rammers are sprung and imaginary cartridges are subjected to supposit.i.tious mastication. Over and over again, in bewildering diversity of succession, are the orders inaccurately given and confusedly executed, until the colonel's martial rage is seemingly appeased. Man wants but little here below, while woman wants many things and wants them all marked down. Both man and woman ought to find in this notable performance a maximum of _quantum suf_.

The perfunctory reading of orders; the reports of first sergeants; the grand spectacular advance of the officers, might each inspire a modern society poem, printed on linen paper with ink worth a dollar a pound.

The final dismissal of parade; the departure of companies to their respective quarters--these are mere routine. They are essential, perhaps, but dull, tasteless, flameless as unleavened sanctimony. It is vanity and vexation to be born with a silver spoon in one's mouth, if there is nothing in the spoon.

Throughout its bellicose career, when occasion permits, the regiment renews its daily practice of this imposing observance. Leaf by leaf the roses fall; day by day the snare-drums call. But practice makes perfect. Within a twelvemonth after muster-in the alert, alive and agile volunteers will have become so facile in their exercise that every motion is pivotal and simultaneous--a thousand with a single joint who hear and move as one. The veteran reverts to his plebe camp experiences even as the aged grandsire recalls the sorrowful coffee and sad biscuit of early matrimonial days. The halo of romance encircles them still!

Every man to his trade, cries the bigamous cobbler, with sh.e.l.l-bark resonance, and tenaciously sticks to his last. Every crank to his whim, every fool to his folly, says common-sense, with some slight conscientious twinges. When uncle Silas comes from South Squam, and, for the first time, confronts the dizzy delights of a gay metropolis, there is danger in the air. Look not upon Monte Carlo when it is red; shun humbugs as you would shun a land t.i.tle based on love and affection. The events we commemorate happened, to all intents and purposes, on a different planet from that now occupying our orbit.

If ever a Dress Parade of hobbies, a review of sham or an inspection of human nature could be displayed, there are grounds for a suspicion that serious complications would ensue. They would equal the ferment from an accidental mixture of gin, gingerbread and sauerkraut, prime standard products of the early Knickerbockers and first exports from New Amsterdam. Bulwer says: "Beware of the poor devil who is always railing at coaches and four; book him as a man to be bribed."

More than thirty years ago, for the last time in the volunteer army of the Union, the welcome call, "Parade is dismissed," rang along the attenuated line of some lingering battalion, and it dissolved into history. Parades, marches and battles were finished. But victory was a.s.sured; its results are embedded and embalmed in the nation's splendid destiny.

It is an inspiring thought that this destiny opens broad and bright before us, and we need only be faithful to our trust to ensure a realization of the fondest dreams of the heroes, saints and martyrs of the olden time. Unrolled around us lies a continent, clothed with verdure as with a garment, heavy with its stores of h.o.a.rded wealth, all reserved for us in virgin purity and freshness since earth's creation morn. Our race is inheritor of the best blood, the best energies, the best principles, the best talent, that have illumined and vivified the human family through all its glorious past.

Here, then, if we and our descendants are true, in this enlarged and beautified Eden, are to be evolved all the grand possibilities of humanity. Here increasing prosperity is to bring increased virtue; increasing intelligence, increased power; increasing culture, increased happiness; increasing freedom, increased n.o.bility. Here the swarming millions yet to be, molded by free inst.i.tutions and universal education into a refined and h.o.m.ogeneous race, multiplying their material comforts by now undreamed-of physical appliances, adorning their homes until each family shall dwell, self-centered, in a world of beauty as in a s.h.i.+ning sphere of crystal, and warming in the suns.h.i.+ne of G.o.d's presence as they grow in moral stature nearer to His throne,--here the coming millions will advance to the millennial fruition promised as the goal of earthly hope and effort.

THE BOYS IN BLUE GROWN GRAY

V

There were no giants in those days that tried men's souls and stored their bodies with unpensionable ailments. Giants, mostly apocryphal, fought battles single-handed in periods of antiquity now remote and malodorous. The last samples perished some centuries ago, painfully regretted. Their spears were rust, their clubs were dust, their souls were with the saints (we trust) long prior to 1861.

The men who put down the slaveholders' rebellion were mostly boys. It is estimated that the soldiers of the Union averaged only nineteen years old when the roar of that first cannon broke on Sumter's walls and echoed down the aisles of time, besides shattering a large invoice of miscellaneous crockery. No such burden ever before fell on the youth of any era; no such imperial manhood was ever before developed in a single generation. Greece molded countless heroes of her own, and has thrust her hand into every ma.s.s of mortal clay that has been fas.h.i.+oned into beauty or power or glory since the days of the demiG.o.ds. But Greece can boast no more perfect heroism than that which made our golden age ill.u.s.trious, conspicuous, lurid as a trolley car in a thunder-storm, for all ensuing ages.

The recruit of 1861 was of the human various species so dear to the articulating frenzy of Mr. Venus. He was intensely human yet various as life's multiform phases in this resplendent hemisphere. He was a farm boy, perhaps, fresh from the white sheets, and fried chicken, and sweet cream, and angel cake of his ancestral roof, with no experience more thrilling than that of the local press and pulpit arising as the voice of one man to celebrate the production of some abnormal cuc.u.mber; he went to town to see the parade, and, vowing he would ne'er enlist, enlisted. He was a store clerk, skilled in pounds, pints and prints, with a thin top dressing of Latin, and a silvery Minnehaha gush of gaiety in every motion. He was a student with columns of logarithms in his head and a theodolite in his stomach; conscientious as a juryman sworn to bring in a verdict according to the law and the lawyers' speeches. He was a mechanic, swart and grim, with steps so energized with mobility that when he walked the pavements rolled and rocked beneath him like waves of the sea.

There were howling swells in that period, but he was not of them.

Reared in the bland atmosphere of plowshares and pruning-hooks, he had no taste for the big orgies in which they reveled. He was not a fast young man, nor did the fast young men, as a rule, make good soldiers, or soldiers at all. Their furore was not the inspiring sentiment of a war for liberty. Their recklessness was not bravery; their wild natures accepted no yoke of discipline. These fast young men traveled rapidly, because their road was all down grade. They were the same then as now, the same yesterday, to-day and next century--worthless and fruitless, first, last and forever. Each successive five years brings a new generation of them, as the novices of five years previous, worn out and burned out by dissipation, disappear over the divide and enter that sulphurous enclosure, that stockade of horrors, where the fires of torment are fed with their festering tissues, and the towers of Tophet re-echo the shrieks of their tortured souls.

These howling swells, these fast young men, these debauched, debased and dissolute youths, these devotees of the world, the flesh and the flowing bowl, had no part or lot in the sacrifices of that heroic era.

The average boy of '61 was of pure metal and exalted worth. The glint of his eye reflected the stars of the flag, and a prophecy of Appomattox was written on his brow. Into the white chambers of his soul only such things could enter as affiliated with the guests already cherished there--his mother, his sister, his sweetheart and his G.o.d.

In the alembic of stern discipline and relentless strife he and his comrades were fused into that h.o.m.ogeneous, glorious host who, on five hundred crimson fields from Wilson's Creek to Bentonville, at a salary of thirteen munificent dollars a month in depreciated greenbacks, put the love of life's joys behind them and, throwing their souls into their bayonets, rushed to the flaming front, careless of wounds or death if only they might help to final victory.

What we call 1861 was not a year. It was history changing front; a cycle dying, an era born. Ignorance was still shaking himself by the hand pompously, after the manner of his species, and saying to himself: "Go to! I am lord of the bailiwick as aforetime; I will bind and stack and thresh as of h.o.a.riest yore." But knowledge was looming; information was coming to the front with a seafaring hitch to his trousers as one who had traveled far; even the professional reformer, who talks dialectics while his wife toils sixteen hours a day to nourish his soaring soul, found auditors. But knowledge did not loom to an adequate alt.i.tude or permeate to a sufficient degree of prevalence. Else had no Southron dared promise himself to whip the people who had invented and built up and managed the great material enterprises of the nation--or desired to whip them. Ignorance fluttered around recklessly until he singed his ostentatious whiskers in the flames of the pit; yea, more,--until he was blistered to the eyebrows with scorchings of the everlasting bonfire. Where ignorance is bliss, politics degenerates into irredeemable idiocy and ineffable slush; the campaign of mutual delusion goes on and on, the whole day long, the whole summer through, the whole year round; the oracle is an imitation statesman, whose head was cast in a heroic mold, but the jelly didn't "jellify;" his clientage is the adult male population of an infested village, whose howling need is a dog-killery. Under such leaders.h.i.+p popular illumination is a slothful, discouraging process.

The modest, uncultivated mule is liable at times to reverse the accepted formula, and put his best foot backward. The half-savage conductors of an orthodox Afro-American cremation in Texas typify an equally marked social retrogression.

It is, as a rule, futile to preach predestination to people who are not in the four hundred, but a general movement for the dissemination of knowledge is effective in tearing away ignorance, as the rich soil of Iowa is ripped up the back with a gang plow. With a due allowance of school-houses in the south forty years ago, the slaveholders'

rebellion would have been impossible, just as in the prosperous, progressive American republic of to-day with ten million depositors in her banks and twenty million children in her schools, a successful a.s.sault on intelligence and prosperity would be impossible. Ignorance, as we have stated, fluttered recklessly near the scorchings of the bonfire. Whereupon knowledge achieved a popularity unprecedented since our first ancestress risked for its acquisition the fairest prospects of her distant and inconceivably mult.i.tudinous posterity.

During ten years next succeeding the war, its loyal survivors were habitually called, half in affection, half in honor: "Our Boys in Blue." Even those who had hated their cause and mourned their success conceded the fitness of a sobriquet which exalted their uniform to the dignity of a moral attribute, and tinged their cla.s.sification with the hue of their trousers. It was Plato who said: "The brave shall be crowned. He shall wed the fair. He shall be honored at the sacrifice and the banquet." This was the era of the wedding, the barbecue, the "present arms" to a phalanx of angels--as was eminently fitting.

The women of '61 were not the wailing watchers and tearful lint-sc.r.a.pers of a too current tradition. They were soulful, heart-strong heroines, the swordless soldiers of the Union.

Lint-sc.r.a.ping and bandage winding were minor episodes. Their work was many sided as a prism, with every angle reflecting a radiant intensity. And all the ladders of grace that led from bloodiest battle-fields straight to the bending heavens, were built up, round by round, from the piety and devotion of intrepid womanhood.

The Boys in Blue were rapidly and happily and most appropriately mated to the n.o.ble girls they left behind them. One of Napoleon's marshals exclaimed when dying: "I have dreamed a beautiful dream." To the Boy in Blue, suffused with blushes as the compliments rained on him, both war and peace were chrysanthemum visions, soft, rosy and spicy. The compliments were well earned and welcome; welcome and wholesome as a thoughtful surgeon's timely prescription in the cold drizzle of a night march, when he proffered his flask with: "Gentlemen, you need a tonic; leave a drop for me!" Even the chastened copperhead hissed no expostulation; he simply folded his Nessus s.h.i.+rt around him and lay down in baffled schemes, his only punishment being an enforced allegiance to the proudest flag and grandest country the world has ever seen.

When ten years more had lent distinction and distance to receding perspectives, the t.i.tle changed to "Our Gallant Veterans." The asperity of opposition had softened; the respect of friends had deepened. There was tenderness in the accent which p.r.o.nounced the words and in the sentiment which inspired them. All recognized that wherever a surviving soldier stood, there was a sentinel of liberty.

The Veterans came to the front in every sphere of activity, with the nerve that stakes a royal flush against a marble synagogue. They performed their full share of every-day work, and they rose to high positions in the state. They generously divided the honors, even turning out early in the morning to give the devil his dews. This was comparatively easy, as the exposure of the crime of 1873 had not then upset nearly everything, nor had the new woman come, constantly provoking controversies with the antagonistic s.e.x.

The Veterans moved on the savage borderland and conquered it. They transferred sandy deserts into radiant farmsteads, festooned with clematis and enameled with gladiolus. Hated by men with stinging consciences or none, they retaliated never--or hardly ever. Though poor they were not discouraged; sockless, they were not ashamed. When bedizzened with frontier fringes, even Doctor Mary Walker with all her trousers was not arrayed like one of them. Many of them went south, where they were greeted with black looks from white men and white smiles from black men; a few remained there and outgrew both.

Gleefully as the beefsteak sings on the gridiron, the ring of their axes sounded through northern forests; their hearts and heads were solid to the innermost core, like the stumps they left behind them.

Broad prairies in the west blossomed with their chinchilla moustaches and their alfalfa whiskers. They opened mines, subdued vast wildernesses, tunneled mountains for railways and syphoned them for irrigation. They equipoised some of that surplus gravity which has at times caused the country to tip up on its eastern edge. They did not wear toothpick shoes, lemon-colored or otherwise; these they left to the weak and vicious elements of an effete civilization.

With the army shoe, the army bean, the army mule, and the unfailing army nerve, they marched on to new and n.o.ble conquests. They organized commonwealths; founded cities; edited newspapers; captured judges.h.i.+ps, governors.h.i.+ps, senators.h.i.+ps, the presidency, administering the multiform functions to their own eternal honor and with benefit to all. Officeholding had charms for them recondite as the link between beans and blue-stockings, inscrutible as the dynamics of a cuc.u.mber which has concealed its aggressiveness until 3 a. m.

Should the demon of filibuster raise his crest from opposition benches in any one of a score of legislative a.s.semblies, you might readily count a full quorum of them, each busily tying knots with his tongue which no agility of his teeth could undo, each kindly instructing novices how to work a tennis racket or advising experts how to extract honey from Celtic ground-apples. Their arguments might be loose in the joints like a plaisance camel, but they unerringly arrived at an available conclusion. The feeble but sage members of a swell chappie clique might p.r.o.nounce them insufferable as to style, but they went on capturing and conquering things by instinctive predilection and force of habit. They experienced little exhilaration from the effervescence of hired rapture and purchased adulation; their financial views habitually had the ring of two metals; their accomplishments might stop short of the mandolin and their scholars.h.i.+p shy at an ablative absolute. But they reached the goal, on the average, and "Get there Eli!" was their practical rendition of the motto "Excelsior."

Of seven presidents elected since the close of the war, six were ex-soldiers. Minnesota points with pride to her nine soldier governors. The Veterans quietly gathered in the voluntary and involuntary honors of their admiring countrymen, while the chief function of their traducers seems to have been to crop thistles, grow ears and bray.

The surviving Veterans of the Union army were neither drones in the busy hive of national development, nor a burden on the benevolence of their fellow-citizens. Ninety-five per cent. of them made a success in the civil battles of life--doing men's part honorably, industriously, heroically in the work of the world. Only five per cent. were failures, less than three per cent. ever became wholly dependent on public charity for support.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _The veterans quietly gathered in the voluntary and involuntary honors.... One state points with pride to her nine soldier governors, and of seven presidents elected since the close of the war, six were ex-soldiers_]

An appalling phalanx of apparitions at times menaced the peace of nervous taxpayers over prospective drafts on their plethoric resources. A cat may kick at a king. Men gifted with wind and lungs, men with well-shaved voice and neatly-modulated nose, have proclaimed a shuddering dread of future difficulty in preparing for wholesale care of the thriftless ex-soldier. But those unsophisticated suspects went on ruthlessly, recklessly, paying their own full share of the taxes and manifestly bent on relentlessly taking care of themselves.

The identical persons who in the honey-dew days of the "Boys in Blue"

had gaily floated in geysers of taffy, constantly sprayed with cascades of gush, were, ten years later, the objects of fathomless solicitude on the part of contemporaries who feared that universal pauperism would engulf them. Vain was the dread; bootless the solicitude. In the aggregate, the discharged Veterans contributed in taxes more than the sum total of their army pay, and by their own productive labor added more to the wealth of the nation than the entire cost of the war. And at any time within the last thirty years there might have been found in all our prisons a larger per capita proportion of former church dignitaries and bank officers than of honorably discharged soldiers of the Union. The typical Veteran was neither a tramp nor a b.u.mmer. He was a thrifty, self-respecting, patriotic citizen. At the plow, the anvil, the lathe; on the engine, the mail car, the s.h.i.+p; in the lumbering camp, the harvest field, the counting-room, the factory; at the bar, on the bench, in the pulpit--everywhere in spheres of useful, successful effort, he wrought faithfully, ardently, triumphantly.

Even where the Veterans never went, their influence penetrated and vivified and fructified. Their aromatic, anaesthetic codfish, their mackerel stuffed with savor and salinity, have carried freedom's tidings to Borneo's wilds. A Grand Army post annually observes memorial day in distant Honolulu. Ireland and Poland, lanced spots of a huge European suppuration, have felt the pulsations of our victory.

And on the dim frontiers of far-off Argentina, sweet girl graduates of Minnesota's normal schools, daughters of Veterans, turbaned with haloes and ap.r.o.ned with the flag, are unfolding the mysteries of orthography, chirography, cube roots, and syllogisms, to rejoicing grandchildren of authentic Patagonian cannibals. Whether as a Daniel come to judgment or a Jonah come to grief, the "Gallant Veteran"

adorned his era--an era that is past.

The third decade brought peculiar revelations and some characteristic iconoclasms, wrought by the most gothic of vandals known to human kind. The deeds of the Boy in Blue and the Gallant Veteran have been told and retold in verses so musical that they might almost be punched with holes and performed on self-playing pianos, automatically, as it were. But the terms are obsolete, and the current period has brought its special designation, tremulous as a phrase from De Senectute, and redolent of lean and slippered Pantaloon--"The Old Soldier." It came in the days when colored cartoons were growing on the country like a bad habit, and it came to stay. Whether applied in honor and tenderness, or in derision and mockery, who can tell?

This epithet tells a truth, though perhaps emanating from indecent exposure of intellect in a brain whose convolutions are more crooked than the ram's horn that triturated the defenses of Jericho. It tells a truth, though more cruel than that sweeping ma.s.sacre when the patriarch Cain came within one of slaying all the youth in Asia, or than the edict which collared and cuffed a dilapidated c.o.xey in the shadow of the capitol's proud dome.

Whether we like it or not, it has elements of permanence,--that euphony which is the kernel of fact; that levity which is the soul of wit; that pointedness which is the test of endurance. It has manifestly come to abide. When the lady lacteal artist lactealizes the sober, circ.u.mspect cow, the product is harmless as the process and partic.i.p.ants; no spirituous or vinous venom from that nouris.h.i.+ng fountain e'er exudes. When the lion eats a lamb the lamb becomes lion; when the lamb eats a lion the results can be better imagined than depicted. When the commonweal tourist falls aweary, he wins consolation from a rehearsal of "Bunion's Pilgrim's Progress, or the Trials of a Trail," and rises refreshed.

When the ex-soldier feels rheumatic twinges clutching at his nerves like an eagle's beak, resistance were vain as kicking at a thunderbolt in crocheted slippers. He is still vigorous, considering all that he has gone through--and all that has gone through him! But he is not invulnerable; some of his elasticity is as deceptive as the hospitality of an alleged park dotted all over with warnings to keep off the gra.s.s. He may profitably display that charity which covers a mult.i.tude of sarcasms, and serenely accept the inevitable as a companion piece to tariff reduction, civil-service reform, lectures on advanced domesticity by the emanc.i.p.ated female whose family lives on canned goods, and other copyrighted jokes. Yes; the Boys in Blue have donned the Gray. They are no longer young; they will never be younger; they are "Old Soldiers" now, and will be to the end.

Meanwhile they exist as an active element in society, none the less interested and observant because of their phenomenal experience. A subtle, half-forgotten aroma of school-boy Latin permeates the back parlors of their minds, but the grand beacon-lights of world history flush all the front windows with a ruddy glow. They lag, superfluous it may be, like lingering aborigines who are chewing salt pork, sandwiched with bread of idleness, out in the bad lands; but they will not linger long. The ribald glee of the society sharp, boasting an aesthetic eclat acquired at Christmas free lunches and other luxurious functions, probes to no sore spots. Honesty is probably the best policy when the amount involved is small, but it is the best principle, always and everywhere. Those who practice it look upon themselves with the pleased astonishment of a man who has made a verified prediction. Those who ignore it look upon themselves with a cold diagonal j.a.panese stare of non-recognition--while still the wonder grows that average-sized consciences can stand so many blows.

The Old Soldier can afford to be honest and admit the hideous imputation of adolescence. Yes! Eleven hundred times, yes. It were safer as well as honester to admit, than to join issue and challenge proof. Should he deny it, any unprejudiced tribunal would summarily rule out all evidence for the defense and refuse to note an exception.