The mild, ethereal wickedness of that fossilized beechnut relating to the dam by a mill site, pales its ineffective glow. It is usually the dictate of wisdom to leave a wild-eyed cannibal in undisturbed possession of his warpath; equally so to be very sparing of sneers at another man's joss. Consequently the driver's amiable diversion is seldom interfered with. When all damages are repaired the procession moves on.
Then begins again the long lumbering creak, to continue in melancholy monotony until another linch-pin breaks or buckle parts asunder. Eighteen miles of tortured wagons roll on and on; white-arched, weighty; relics of a thorny, stormy past, yet pregnant with an illimitable future. They bristle with tent-poles, trail tangled tent ropes far behind, and exude knapsacks, haversacks, canteens, drums and drum majors at every pore. They are festooned around and beneath with clinging mess pans, pendulous camp kettles, and thelike differentiation of iron-mongery. If the weather is fine this creak and grind and rumble goes on and on, with monotonous, mechanical steadiness, subject to accidents as aforesaid, until the tuneful, sagacious Mule sings the long roll, as he instinctively scents approach to the preordained place of encampment, when welcome night draws nigh.
This is the poetry of transportation, jolly as a cake-walk, comfortable as a smoking jacket, easy as reducing the labor question to an exact science by the acceptance of a generous salary as walking delegate. But when rains descend and floods come, the scenery shifts; wagons, muleteers and quadrupeds are indiscriminately plunged into diluvial quagmires, fathomless as air and shoreless as the gulf-stream. Then the liquified turnpike spreads over the valleys and yellow cascades roar down the defenseless ruts.
Then the climax of helpless wretchedness arrives, always fatefully tumbling on the articulated anatomy of a hapless, cadaverous Mule. Beneath him even chilled-steel agony can not go. He gathers in all its multiplexhorrors, computed on the Utah plural family plan. He would win a Columbian Exposition medal for the most picturesque collection of miseries—picturesque, variegated and altogether astonishing. They overwhelm him like a bather submerged in sea waves twenty feet high, each weighing a thousand tons, half brine and half sledge-hammer.
The quenchless, marvelous mule emerges from the mire and clay, with a whooping-cough wheeze(Page63)
No man can adequately realize what magnificent folly he is capable of until he sees his own old love-letters set forth in the cold, cruel print of some hideous newspaper. No man can fully appreciate the faithfulness of our devoted animal co-workers until he sees a crucial test applied. The quenchless, marvelous Mule emerges from the mire and clay, with a whooping-cough wheeze, driven to preternatural exertions by redoubled curses and quadrupled scourgings.
His step is quick, short and grasping. The spirit inherited from some remote Hambletonian antetype flames in his nostrils. He rings a fire alarm, hoists the grand hailing sign of distress, and defiantly dashes his toe-calks through to hard pan. He rushes down thehigh bluff, over the muddy flat, across the cold stream, up the steep bank—lashed, lathered and spurred. With a whisk of his tail that scatters bullets of mud he springs to the tremendous task. His body is squat to the earth at times, but his ears always point starward. Every muscle hisses with the heat of the strain and every nerve is burning; his whole frame quivers and smokes as he bursts into supremest effort and brings his freightage to the goal, or dies in his tracks, a speechless, unsung martyr to the cause. No burial, no monument, no obituary.
To the Army Mule in camp, if anywhere, rest, rations and felicity should come. A surplus of excitement is injurious to the nerves, but life wholly without an atmosphere is in peril from suffocation. Rest is alleged to be the only unfailing antidote to Dr. Bright's widely advertised kidney complaint. Camp is recreation in army service as courting is the play spell of the soul. The farmers in politics, dedicated to a maximum of talk and a minimum of toil, need no proclamation from the governor bidding them holda fast from work in order to enjoy a feast of discussion.
The free-lunch rounder, with pretzel crumbs on his mustache, loves above all things to sit easy at his inn. Even the emancipated lady prays earnestly for deliverance from the fatigues of the conservative, innocent, purely platonic schottische. Consequently no blame can justly attach to the worn and worried Mule for standing ever in readiness to fall in with propositions for honorable repose. Beautiful are his anticipations of a good time in camp; beautiful as a statue of hammered brass, and as hollow. The hollowness results from the fact that no reckoning was made of the hare-lipped despot at the other end of the picket rope.
Ten pounds of grain and thirty pounds of hay is the daily allowance. Some pie-plant professor of an agricultural institute, with a marked-down set of artificial eyebrows hung at oblique angles to his nose, long ago figured it out on strict mathematical principles of animal economy. The court records it and the law doth give it. Thrice happy isthe beast that gets it; happy, but rarer than Indians with side whiskers and ideality. Straw, stalks, tent pins and cracker boxes are his more reliable provender. These are reinforced with stray bites now and then, when he can chew himself loose, from a private's laundered and lively underwear drying on a limb, or from the cold shoulder of a corporal of the guard.
In the sweet, serene night watches, when slumber's chain had manacled us, roving Mules may have rubbed noses while hatching a bleak and dark conspiracy to massacre the brigade and plunder the forage train. But it came to naught; possibly for lack of leadership. There was no relief for the oppressed, defrauded Mule. No satiating food for him, savory as Lyonaise potato softly tinctured with onion. No lollipop confectionery for him, melting in the mouth like painted butter. Empty is the nosebag, even as to plebeian oats; empty as the wit of irreverent soldiers who josh the chaplain and gibe at the Mule.
An agricultural inquirer once wrote to HoraceGreeley asking if guano was good to put on potatoes. The busy editor replied that it might do for men whose taste had been vitiated by tobacco and rum, but for his own eating he preferred gravy. This was the cranberry tart retort of the illustrious journalist, with a tough undercrust of misconception, it is true. The condiments for the Army Mule's camp banquet were not of the spice spicy. He has clear memories of a voracity which created wide vacuum in sundry greenswards, and played havoc with corn cribs manifold. The voracity remains, but the swards and cribs are far, far away.
At spasmodic intervals a sympathetic warrior, having burned all the top rails of an informally confiscated fence, will toss the juicy and edible bottom rail to the pleading, omniverous Mule, residuary legatee of camp-fires. This is good average food in times of internecine strife, when so simple an article as pie is a precious prerogative. But such well-flavored morsels are too uncertain for standard sustenance. For shockingly protracted periods, he stands unfed, neglected, receiving all suggestionswith a squeal and a kick, while the zephyrs disinfect his fur. Pending which, stark, grim skeletons of all the barked and branchless trees within stretch of his tether attest the final result of an attempt to adjust his Minnesota appetite to his Andersonville rations. If watered twice a week he may vote himself lucky; he has not even the surfeit of a teetotaler's wassail, where water flows like wine. "A Mule feels chilly in July," says the Talmud; if his temperature depends on the supply of internal fuel, there is limited space for astonishment.
Meanwhile an unsanctified teamster, with red hair and hare-lip, blushing with innocence until his whiskers singe in the heat, enjoys the encampment episode to the uttermost. In Constantinople public opinion is gauged by the prevalence of nocturnal conflagrations, and the number of hanged bakers decorating the street corners next morning. But in camp there is no concentrated public opinion sufficiently intense to mete out due retribution to the profligate castigator of the fodderless, thirsty Mule. He sleeps on ample beddingof good sweet hay, and has large store of gerrymandered corn to exchange for toothsome luxuries. His tobacco is of the costliest brand and he defiantly blows the froth of numerous beers from his blasphemous lips. He carries a full purse and a steady nerve; also a bomb-proof conscience void of offense. Bad medicine, he!
The jocundities of life in camp we may gatherad nauseamfrom the romances of some of the professors of freehand drawing who enlisted as army correspondents; but for purposes of authentic history these narratives are worthless as second-hand champagne corks. The jocularities referred to have no interest to the solemn, imperturbable Mule save when he is an object of their malevolence. Then they are more interesting than enjoyable. The swell imbecile carries an umbrella under his arm through crowded streets until its tip is garnished with the eye of some unfortunate fellow wayfarer; the man who loses the eye fails to see the point of—the joke.
The Mule is not much of a joker himself; but as a victim of practical jokes, fine, funny orchestnutty, he has become widely celebrated. His resentment of these preposterous hilarities, all of which are on thepassésocial code of roller rinks, has caused much of the reputation for waspy temper which now attaches to him with the tenacity of a bachelor girl to the state of single blissfulness. Temper changes with status, as was ascertained by the enthusiast who originally named hisfiancéeRevenge because she was sweet, but now that she is his wife calls her Delay because she is dangerous.
The city man who would own a farm should have a good income well assured elsewhere, for it will certainly be needed. The foolhardy individual who proposes to play tricks on a mule should be well buttressed with sound accident policies. Beware the irritated quadruped! Look not into the red mouth of a wild Numidian lion; touch not the royal Bengal tiger's remotest whisker-tip; avoid the little black bull with an eye like a razor's edge; make no experiments with the terminal facilities of the speechless, inscrutible Mule!
His ways are past finding out; his kicks areincalculable, inexplicable, incomprehensible. He sometimes allows patience to pile up in ridges on his neck, while the battalions of wrath are debouching from all quarters into his hoof. Then the eruption breaks out with torpedo suddenness and with an energy of fury that rivals the deafening roar which smites the aggregated ear of the magnificent metropolis, when fire invades the wholesale district.
Blessed is the nation whose annals are uneventful—America is safe with fifteen million children in the public schools and three thousand citizens to one soldier. Happy is the bride whom the sun shines on whether matriculated at Ognotz or merely captivated at Topeka. Joyous to the weary mechanic the picnic of his labor holiday, with its lemonade, its orations, and its other things that lull to peaceful slumber. Halcyon to the Army Mule are monotonous days in camp, when they bring surcease of torment as well as toil; red-lettered if therewithal be brought, by rare concatenation, such plethora of long forage as drowns vicissitude in bright beatitude. Inthat case he rounds out radiantly and within the cycle of a very few days develops beyond recognition. His protrusions disappear like the vanishing lines of a mineral lode. His rumps accumulate fat and his girth expands with a facility that is amazing. His eye takes on a new gleam and his bray acquires a fresh intonation.
Moreover, he is speedily transformed into a bold aristocrat. He cultivates style and assumes airs of conscious superiority equal to the contemptuous sniff of a Fifth avenue dog who has smelled some chance passer-by two or three grades below par. His future may be uncertain as a Spaniard's veracity or a Frenchman's paternity; but he lives in the glad and glowing present, with the nonchalance of a Russian official hunting for fragments of the czar by torchlight, after a popular demonstration.
Of the Mule in battle, lean is the record's exploitation. There is little danger that his renown in that line will ever be subversive of our liberties and other luxuries. Right is forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on themake, as of old. But the placid, benevolent Mule never takes up arms against either party—our quartermaster's returns of uncounted thousands "lost in action" to the contrary notwithstanding. It even seems difficult to secure credit for such service as he actually rendered. His occasional sporadic work in artillery teams is wholly forgotten. His frequent spurts to the flaming front with ammunition wagons is entirely ignored.
A common, peaceful explosion of powder magazines at home not only shatters all the windows in the neighborhood, but also shatters the faith of people for miles around in the doctrine of resurrection of the body. So the peaceful nature of the Mule is fatal to any accumulation of reputation bubbles, where bayonets bristle and saltpeter burns. Were he ten times the tin-clad child of havoc that he is, the florid, hare-lipped arbiter of his destinies would see to it carefully that, barring accidents, his opportunities for responding to long rolls should be few.
The Chicago socialists tendered an olive branch to the police made of gas-pipe andcharged with nitroglycerine in a highly persuasive state of concentration. But when the red and riotous fume of the bomb-throwers' breath permeated the haymarket like a pestilence, no army Mule mingled with the medley of frowzy trousers. No more do we hear of him at Shiloh or Champion Hill or Cedar Creek.
For offensive purposes the Mule was, in general, harmless as a United States frigate or a divinity student at a bean-bag festival, or the ghost of a goose, white, downy and clamorous. The valedictorian of the last class at the Keeley cure, permeated with a variety of virtuous joint and several resolutions, could scarcely be more docile. Even the reproachful Confederate smokehouse could not shake its gory padlock at the stainless, unimpeachable Mule—although he carried a jimmy equal to most emergencies, he could, as a rule, readily establish an alibi. When fodder is really in the shock, and frost is ready to be cleft from pumpkins with a snow-plow, then such free tubers as have been produced in sweet charity's name on the Pingree planshould be harvested without procrastination; delays are perilous at that season of the year. The evil effects of the shock, however, can be minimized, by feeding the fodder, in advance, to the harmless, appreciative Mule. Forewarned is four times armed, or more.
Non-combatants and impedimenta compose the rear of an army when it is in action. Here assemble great drinkers of alcohol, and vast eaters, who measurably justify Germany's subsequent discrimination against the American hog—all of whom let concealment like a chinch-bug prey on their damaged cheeks, their necks, meanwhile, being given over to the ravages of the army flea. Here in secure serenity mobilize numerous excellent subjects for the romantic young woman who yearns for a lovely debauchee to reform. Here congregate cooks, commissaries and sutlers—this last with a sage-brush tinge of disappointment in his aspect, and a Jenness-Miller cut of trousers on his limbs. Here recreate skulkers who simulate heroes, and sneaks in the garbage of soldiers, all cumberers of the ground, like a prophet gone to seed in hisown country. Here gather men of Trilby feet and mighty thirst, who are riotous with repartee, but intensely hostile to all manner of soft beverage; also cowards, inveterate as the upward tendency of tartar emetic; moreover, quartermasters' clerks, spouting bloodthirstiness like a congressional candidate, or some other gas well; likewise, here in the rear, are mule wagons, mule pack trains, mule teams, mule drivers and Mules.
When retreating or outflanked the order is varied and rear becomes front instanter. Then unthinkable confusion reigns. A financial catastrophe brought on by forty-cent wheat and ten-cent statesmanship looking at facts through a long-distance binocle, is bad enough. An explosion of the swear tank for a thought distillery in the higher realms of journalism is even worse, if possible. But when a Mule dam breaks, the thundering reverberation of its tumultuous hoofs is a resonant forecast of pandemonium rampant. Vain and futile then all ardent aspiration for such quiet as ensues when the wicked cease from borrowing and the female elocutionist soars and bores no more!Our cavalry out-posts were broken doses of soothing syrup for the nervous flanks of the infantry, and often stampeded the front line by their too precipitate retrogression.
A stampede of Mule teams to the rear had all thespirituelfeatures and picturesque complications of an arrangement of tariff schedules on the principle of local option. Attempts at control were hopeless as piloting a national campaign when the American voter is on the rampage. It was a chaotic conglomeration of convulsive uproar, sufficient to whirl down any hope of glory with a sickening slump. The gentleman from out of town, who, in spite of conspicuous warning, blows out the gas, makes his exit from sublunary strife in enviable quietude. No such privileges are extended to the end man of a Mule rush. In exclusive social circles, the dress may be a dream, and the bill a nightmare, but in the mixed companionship we are contemplating, this impromptu display is a veritable delirium tremens of undelineated horror.
Frederick the Great shouted to a fleeing battle-straggler, "Wretch, wouldst thou liveforever?" and paralyzed him. The unabashed army teamster, with a sliced upper lip and hair æsthetically matching his sorrel Mule, sprinting along the broad highway of wrath, pitched downward at an angle of forty-five degrees toward perdition, would have admitted the soft impeachment, and pursued his flight, lashing, blaspheming. He may have been, at home, as consistent a Baptist as ever yoked a steer, but for this occasion all rules are suspended by unanimous consent, and precedent tumbles headlong. The coincidence of a florid girl and a pale horse is always exasperating, at least to the girl; a hurried retreat in the presence of a menacing enemy, naturally exasperates to full pitch of desperation the belligerent boss of the nimble, obedient Mule.
In numberless miscellaneous episodes of a military sphere, the Army Mule was marked high as to deportment. Though of somewhat irregular character, even verging at times on the diabolical, he emulated the standards of the officer and the gentleman. We can afford to mix a little sentiment withour matter of fact. We can afford to drop a tear when the object is worth it. We can afford a note of eulogy under like circumstances, even to an Arizona cayuse fattened on bunch-grass to the rotundity of a prickly pear.
Yes, certainly, business thrift is commendable, but when it comes to crossing the lightning-bug with the honey-bee so that the latter can work at night, we draw the line. Sentiment aside, there is a measure of truth in the averment that the Army Mule and the army bean put down the rebellion. The dancing diplomat, with his twisted comprehensions and his addled complacencies may not appreciate it. Such an one, having never associated with the speechless, unspeakable Mule, nor, indeed, had any legitimate business transactions with him, may possibly still assert that the lion is king of beasts. Far from it! The lion will serve as a freak, children half price; but for steady days' works, for genuineaplomband musical dexterity of wide longitudinal range, the courteous, dignified Mule was preeminently peerless.
To hospital and guard-house, Siamese bugbearsof honorable service, he was a stranger. It was never necessary to detail a fatigue squad to police his ears. The worthy chaplain, fresh from green pastures of civil life, where he fed the juicy lambs and clubbed the tough old rams of the flock, found no occasion for reproof to the silent, orthodox Mule.
No venial dereliction ever subjected him to stoppage of pay or reduction to the ranks, even when the fodder that he longed for never came. No court-martial, reeking with pungent odors of staple and fancy sutlers' goods, ever met to arbitrate his predestinated destiny. You might tie his tail like a pretzel, or pound his bray in a mortar, yet would not his serenity depart from him. The proneness of his voice apparatus to go off at half cock unfitted him for crooked works of strategy—he could never be relied on either to "lie" in wait or "steal" on an enemy. How gratefully he turns with a maple-sap thaw in his aspect, when his neck has been stripped of the blistering harness; how joyously his eager nostrils sniff the forage from afar. Oh! grateful, melodious Mule!
A zoological riddle, offspring of amalgam and miscegen as unclassifiable as a severe case of Debs aggravated by symptoms of Coxey and Altgeld, he had, nevertheless too much animal self-respect to ever incur censure for getting humanly drunk. While the giddy whirl of current events whirls even more giddily, let us remember that virtue in his favor.
Man's frailty darkens many a sad, sad story—sad as a volume of the Congressional Record; the Army Mule's frailties were few, his conquests many. He was amiable after all; even General Butler, the most illustrious heavenly twin of war times, conceded that much. His temper was by no means of the cactus order, generally speaking. He chooses grudges with rare discrimination; it is always safe to suspect the man that a Mule hates. Patient in toil; silent in suffering; cogent and cautious as the rule in Shelly's case; serene amid direst confusion and alarm; heedless of ancient sarcasms decaying or petrified, he was in no sense a grumbler, and in no unpardonable sense a kicker. His hours of feed were unstable as the advertising rates of apoor but honest journalist, yet he was lighter of heart than a newly married gent rushing the oil can to a corner grocery.
If to his straight enduring back a mountain howitzer was sometimes strapped and fired without unslinging, he accepted the indignity, went to grass with the recoil, and rose for the next inning, unruffled as an expert witness emerging from the labyrinth of a hypothetical question—oh! dimless, unknowable Mule!
A retired tobacconist adopted for the motto of a fresh coat of arms to be emblazoned on his carriage panels: "Quid Rides?" Why do you laugh? After a Saint Petersburg assassination episode it is comparatively immaterial whether you call the widow czarina or imperatritza. In these peaceful days, Lincoln's speech at Gettysburg, translated into the jingling speech of Chinamen, and even into the jabbering Japanese, which rivals the contortions of the kinetoscope, opens a new evangel to their narcotic, Oriental souls. Sherman's marvelous retreat from Atlanta to Savannah is studied by the strategists of deepest Afgahnistan; alleged busts of JohnA. Logan are worshiped as idols in innermost Kamchatka, and spicy narratives we told to credulous marines are the basis of classic fiction on the Congo.
Hence nothing is frivolous that lends an added array to the most luminous chapter of contemporary history—of any history. While in the matter of beer, the foreigner unquestionably pays the tax, or most of it, yet as between natives, white-colored may lose and black may win; 'tis hard to tell. Make no mistake as to the intrinsic, historic importance of the forgotten, unforgetting Mule!
The empty skeptic may come forth with fire in his eye and boiled egg on his whiskers seeking to overwhelm us with the gorgeousness of his gush or the sumptuousness of his gall. To empty skeptics, or shallow scoffers, these simple annals of a lowly career may seem fruitless as that famous sour apple tree that failed to yield its promised harvest; hopeless as the perpetual revolutions of a bob-tailed dog chasing the vacant space where the tail should be; tasteless as fried smelts; thankless as opening a mint sauce to the free coinageof lamb. The chappie fellows who flutter at functions and titter at teas may scoff or scorn. But the eye of calm philosophy ought to beam kindly on a faithful effort to weave unconsidered trifles of truth into a wreath of earned, though meager and belated justice, so that even the wayfaring man, though full, need score no errors.
The speechless, unquenchable Mule was a real factor in those events we love to commemorate. It is asserted that only one man now survives who helped whip Lee at Gettysburg, and then marched triumphantly with Grant into conquered Vicksburg next day. But the Army Mule did both, and more! He went out with the mob of pinfeather volunteers, who spent their first callow days principally in vociferous "swearing in," and their sappy nights at discordant drills in patriotic minstrelsy.
With less recognition than even the barnstormers' encore of addled carrot and frumescent cabbage, he helped wet-nurse our infant regiments when they were just getting able to sit up and gaze vacantly around.With a prodigious faculty in his heels for putting strange faces in heaven, he held himself in commendable subjection while incipient legions evolved themselves out of chaos. He passed on, beaten with many stripes, to that multitudinous aggregation called an army, where human atoms, swarming and wriggling to the music of brass bands, like agile mites in a nugget of archaic cheese, united to give him the frigid shake with a glad hand. The girl, photographed for her lover with her vail down, that his sister might not recognize the likeness, was a miracle of modest artifice; thrice proficient in meritorious cunning, the unassuming, artful Mule.
Unequally yoked in servitude to a cowboy taskmaster, unlovable as the venerable Smallweed's brimstone, blackbeetle helpmeet, also redheaded, hare-lipped and stuffed with nitric nine-cornered blasphemy, he plodded painfully on. Stark and indurate like an Adirondack meadow enameled with trap rock, he plodded rigidly on. Anhungered and athirst, with no credit at the sutler's, on he plodded, through hot, white clouds of drastic turnpikedust, or red and hideous depths of gummy mud, dragging incredible burdens of those indispensable supplies that smooth war's wrinkled front and quell its clamoring emptiness. When he diffidently claimed his share of such supplies, he was given the marble heart or the dry and dreadful laugh—yea, the juiceless, mechanical laugh, with daggers in it.
Oh! liberty, what humbugs are nurtured in thy name! Prodded and flayed until his staggering knees, his welt-fretted haunches and his bloody nostrils placarded his agony, the Army Mule accepted the wideopen policy of his castigator and crunched his barmecide feasts, lacerated and scarified, hoping the brighter day.
Like the intoxicating bewilderment of a reception ball, decorated with roses, lilies, smilax, palms and electric illumination, come back to us those grateful reminiscences, crowded with apparitions of the maligned, mellifluous Mule. Leashed and shackled, foodless in the drizzly, sleety camp, when our quarrel with destiny was an octave higherthan usual, his cheerful night cries, welcome as suicides to a coroner, exorcised the blue devils of our dolorous solitude.
While fumes of our priceless coffee floated pleasantly pungent like the cedar aroma of a moth closet, the tuneful echoes of those night cries floated also—Mule answering unto Mule in fond, fraternal recognition. Baptized with fire, adjacent or remote, even if only with its rumors and reflections, the pattering skirmish shots of distant action, he at length became a veritable veteran. Like a thrice-rejected suitor finally made happy, he had been well shaken before taken. And now, a warrior bold, seasoned to war's alarms, he could, upon occasion, thirst or seem to thirst for gore, with all the mad ferocity of a sheep smitten with hydrophobia, or a camel charged with nitroglycerine. Duplicating the awkwardness of man's debut into polite society delayed until past the meridian of life, this ardor of the mettled, military Mule, if late, was touchingly conspicuous.
Marching triumphant home, kneesprung but irrepressible, his large, luxuriant earswere tremulous with the hysterical emotions of the hour, and his double-turreted voice was loudest in the wild acclaim of victory. Long years he lived, it may be, wearing on knightly shoulder a proud insignia of his service, the indellible brand of honor, which no humility of avocation could degrade nor purse-proud aristocracy of money bags, the basest known on earth, contemn with impunity. And when the end comes, as come it must, even to the longevous Mule, then speechless and unspeakable at last and eternally, the flag under which he toiled might be put to worse uses than that of covering his emaciated frame as it is trundled off to the glue-factory.
I mean no disrespect to the flag.
That flag is our flag! Man has always and everywhere sought in bannered blazonries the symbol of a sovereign power. Everywhere and in all times some emblem of a might which confessed no mightier has led embattled hosts to triumph, and taught heroic spirits how sweet it is to die. The bannerbecomes the crystallization of the nation's life, and the embodiment of her glory, until fighting beneath it is patriotism, dying for it is immortality, and treachery to it is the blackest of crimes. Our flag of beauty and renown, descending to us from stainless sires by a shining pathway, pure as that down which the holy grail slipped from the opening heavens, won a new lustre in the hands of our generation. Overlapping each other in the crowding profusion of their golden legends, every stripe of our banner is weighty with its battle roll, even as each silver star burns the prime jewel in a crown of valorous achievement.
Donelson and Shiloh and Vicksburg; Nashville, and Murfreesboro, and Kenesaw; Winchester and South Mountain and Antietam; Gettysburg and the Wilderness and Appomatox—these and five hundred more. How the deathless names gild the resplendent folds of the proud ensign of liberty! Flag of the continent, rivers and seas; flag of a reunited country; flag of the glorious past and of thedimless future; flag of freedom; flag of the world!
Washed in the blood of the brave and the blooming,Snatched from the altars of insolent foes;Burning with star-fires, but never consuming,Flash its broad ribbons of lily and rose.
Washed in the blood of the brave and the blooming,Snatched from the altars of insolent foes;Burning with star-fires, but never consuming,Flash its broad ribbons of lily and rose.
Let us never cease to cherish the remembrance of the days when we followed it and fought for it. Among the soft, delicious echoes of those days which float booming across the ocean of memory will sometimes come, whether we greet it kindly or coldly, a sunny recollection of the seductive wink, the tuneful bray and the electric kick of the Army Mule.
II
NOWthe time has arrived when this matter of the Sutler should be brought into its true alignment. His status should be differentiated and embalmed in due longitudinal sections of small pica. It should be finally settled whether he was the reincarnation of a seventeen-year locust, or only a pansy blossom, with lips all mute like a thinking star in the back row of a ballet. An excess of incertitude also prevails as to his rank and historic area. This latter at least should be staked out and cross-sectioned for the annals that portray scenes when heroes' heels were on the shore of Maryland, my Maryland;which annals are expected to go shimmering down festive centuries clothed in the perennial freshness of St. Shamrock's day in the morning.
The Sutler was born, not made. That is to say, his tendencies were ingrained, perhaps hereditary, even in cases where his selection was nepotic or accidental. Once he was purer than beautiful snow, it may be, but even then he was a Sutler in embryo. And when the beautiful snow was gone; when gentle spring had sprung and the croak of the crocus was heard in the land; when the premature robin, wearing a sore throat and lung-pads, came with hoarse notes whistling of peace when there was no peace, because Sumter had surrendered—then Sutlers blossomed out with the peach trees, to bear miscellaneous fruitage later on.
Army service gave technical nomenclature to many familiar avocations and characteristics. Smoked halibut by any other designation would be a thirst-provoker just the same. But some of these military titles were very effective disguises. The ecclesiasticalmonitor, from spur to plume a star of sanctimony, was called the chaplain. The pharmaceutical tenderloin, with a razor edge to his voice at sick-call ceremonies, was called a surgeon. The district messenger boy was called an adjutant, and could upon occasion play a notable poker game with the able assistance of his sleeve. The hearse thronged with blood-curdling Lady Macbeth suggestions was called an ambulance, and its driver, sure of dry lodgings, ranged high up in the Four Hundred. The speechless indispensable instrument of transportation, which performed most of the work and received none of the pay or glory, was called a mule, with various picturesque prefixes. The sergeant-major, noted for vast acrobatic ability and imposing length of leg, was called—everywhere. The colonel was often called a —— fool; the quartermaster was usually called a —— rascal; and the real rascal was sometimes known as the Sutler. The blanks represent profanity, which I abhor.
Before those subsequent halcyon days when it had been demonstrated by experience thatthe beneficent and plenteous sweet potato supplied the precise nutritive elements best calculated to evolve serene contentment and epicurean bliss; while yet each soldier was a voluble and self-satisfied critic of tactics, strategy, logistics, finance and diplomacy—then a Sutler's supplies were deemed absolutely essential to the successful prosecution of war. But even then a measurable discernment prevailed. Positive subtle, comparative and superlative Sutler, was an acceptable etymologic formula in many varieties of North American broken English. That was a period famous for the wild coinage of phraseological vacuums into available linguistic currency, and for the mad massacre of innocent idioms. If this formula is incorrect it should be promptly amended by some of the back-easty opinion architects who now lead public sentiment with a stub-pointed pen, in long-distance controversies with hired prevaricators of a capitalistic press out in Idaho, such as write their articles on birch bark and wear a coat only on legal holidays. We can not always trust the future, especially at our age.Corrections should be made now—the able editors need not all speak simultaneously.
The Sutler kept, or at least tried to keep, alleged articles of virtu for sale to the "boys," so-called, meaning the soldiers. With warm hearts, cold feet, flexible stomachs, bashful consciences, and a perpetual feeling of weariness in the mouth, these "boys" constantly environed him from zenith to nadir and return. Selling was hard as teaching silver-tongued statesmen that cleanliness and godliness are contiguous. Keeping was harder than selling, and getting pay was hardest of all. Thus beset with hardships his lot rivaled in cheerlessness that of the scratcher in politics, with a wasp-waisted brain, a protuberant rectitude, a self-lubricating egotism, and exactly the minimum of soul that serves in lieu of salt to save his carcass from decay. What with shortage and leakage and stealage by pretended friends, often self-convicted like a young man with an indentation of corset steel in his cuffs, on the one hand, and imminent risk of capture by an alert enemy on the other hand, the Sutler'sstock in trade was rather more uncertain than the salivary aim of a sociable Virginian.
The causes, incidents and results of the war in which he was a stockholder with personal liability, though not a managing director, were momentous to him as to all mankind, including such as still gnash their teeth over him and revile his memory. It was a turning point in the progress of a race; the culmination of a long series of political events; the breaking down of an extended line of political compromises futile as an attempt to combine finance with faro; the upheaval of a mountainous aggregation of suppressed political forces; the explosion of a mighty reservoir of hidden political combustibles; and in its attendant events, as well as its remote consequences, it was as tremendous a revolution as any which freights the records of human destiny. This must be remembered to the Sutler's credit as he drifts off into the subsequently.
It was a vast army. Why, its brass buttons alone weighed over a thousand tons! No Sutler was ever drafted into that army.Hence no Sutler ever hired a substitute and afterward suffered reproach for failure to weave immortelles around his sarcophagus. He could not wait for the draft; the last thing he desired was a substitute. He wanted to go himself. He volunteered early and often, with visible alacrity and enthusiasm. He frequently tumbled over himself in his eagerness to move the previous question, and blasphemed his own folly with plunging-shot fierceness a little later. As the aborigine exchangeth wampum for small-pox, silk hat and delirium tremens, so the sanguine Sutler often parted with peace of mind for very inadequate consideration. Rosy were his dreams of rolling, gloating wealth; cruel his awakening to the paralyzing verity. Frailty, thy name is fortune! Only an expert can distinguish between an asset and a liability.
Acquit him in advance of hypocrisy and thus clarify the record. Money was his avowed objective, the richly upholstered goal of his solicitude,—money, even if merely accumulated for division among the lawyers retained to break a will, as too frequently eventuates.For him one crowded shower of glorious gold was worth a whole aurora borealis of golden glory, earned at thirteen dollars a month and half rations. Others might fight battles or write ballads for his country; he was content to peddle its "Thomas and Jeremiah" fluid in flat tin cans, surreptitious, villainous, and expensive. Others might stand like Sheridan at Stone's river, holding his division amidst a cyclone of shotted flame; he only asked a front seat at the paytable. Others might manage the finances of a nation and temper wind to shorn shams; he only petitioned that Sutler's checks be made full legal tender in his military division. Others might yearn or pretend to yearn for bleeding wounds and storied busts; sufficient unto him was two hundred per cent. profit on cove oysters of antiquity. Like a fashionable belle, his heart was always in the right place—the market place. Honor and fame from no such conditions rise.
Pardonable then was his wrath when edibles and potables disappeared unpaid for into parts unknown save to the Latin tongue,whence they could be recovered only by the gentle persuasion of a stomach pump. Thus the yellow coinage of his rapt preliminary visions faded incomprehensibly into nothingness. Thus he emulated the survivors of a cholera epidemic who only hear in happy dreams the footsteps of return. Give him air! He had cause for chagrin equal to that of the Senegambian colony with a new coon in town and no heat hot enough to roast a 'possum. He had a right to grow apoplectic with fury and devastate the camp like a commercial maelstrom or a political avalanche. He righteously resented; he piously protested. He were a craven else, and the heir and ancestor of cravens. Do you laugh at him? So did Sarah laugh at the angels, but they laughed last.
That the Sutler's gallantry in action was specially exemplified in a "charge," is a chestnut bald and hoary with unchallenged longevity. It is one of those remarks that vegetate through a sequence of drowsy centuries, to reappear during each spring season of chronology with a masterful reach thatbrushes cobwebs from the skies and topples chimneys down. Representative war-humorists who ride astride the whistling winds, spurting effluent sluices of word-wash, and typical war orators sorely afflicted with engorgement of vocabulary, combine to exploit this moldy scintillation, joint product of brain sweat and elbow unguent. They talk through their chapeaux. Every man is a quotation from his forefathers. Every pun is a quotation from paleocrystic cerebration. As vinegar to the teeth and smoke to the eyes, so is misprint witticism to the properly instructed intelligence. It is wicked to laugh at a bishop; it is criminal to laugh at jokeless jocularity. He who can separate eloquence from the gastric gases and distinguish between the sharps and flats offacetiæ, suppressing his intellectual impatience at the unbridled linguistic solecism, may pertinently ask: Wherefore not? To charge was human, but to collect was sublime; always difficult, often impossible. The credit a Sutler was obliged to give was often as long as a plea in chancery. He was the old man notafraid of eternity; and the prospective extended term of payment, if happily payment should ever come at all, was a prime element in adjusting margins of profit. His sole competitor in this line of making a charge is said to be the modern plumber—he of the slow step and quick respiration redolent of raw onions—he of the small tenderness and large bill. But that is a chestnut musty as the other. Boycott both of them! Only a man of most stomachful and gunpowder instincts, a warrior and a blood-quaffer from aforetime, could long survive the rueful infliction of either.
Although war without a Sutler would have been a barren ideality, worse than politics without the negro, or the free coiner, or the prohibitionist not taxed, yet even with him there was a not infrequent flaw in its felicities. The fact may even at this late day be duly verified by numerous surviving old soldiers, that when he was wanted he was seldom there, and when he was there he seldom had what was wanted. Milk for babes; skim milk for pigs and calves; buttermilk for dyspepticopulence. Beverages more pungent, searching and responsive were in demand at the Sutler's tent. He trafficked within complex circumscriptions; always threatened with craft and rapacity; always perspiring with fear like the marble statues in Rome at the approach of Hannibal; always liable to be welcomed with bloody hands to an inhospitable calamity. No country cross-roads grocer's assortment was his, reeking with pestiferous perfume of salt fish and sauerkraut; filling the air with a duchess of limburger reminiscence, which was liable to cause the effigy of freedom on her mountain height to experience a very tired feeling. The etiquette of war and the eternal laws of military necessity governed his movements and halts, his stations and stock, his buying and selling. None of the syrupy sweetness and languid trickle of spring poetry voiced his experiences, tempting to practices incompatible with the professions of one who desires to lead an earnest life. The list of his permissibles embraced a varied miscellany ofnon-desiderata, vast as the outfit of the greatest show on this or anyother earth. The catalogue of contraband exhibited numberless objects of universal allurement. Peradventure his lockers held six gross of pale pills for pink people (no buyer); meantime his patrons clamored for cheese, cheese, when there was no cheese; not a microbe. Marvel not that wrath accumulated and men bewailed—some men never do get through teething.
Thus the irony of his fortune was more bitter than the jollity of a wake, with the corpse lying in state next door. While popular articles were quickly sold or stolen, the residuary stuff, howling abominations which none would buy or steal, lingered flyblown or fermenting. They were satirized and flouted by the dullest varlets in the regiment, who were notably afflicted with Ananias-and-Sapphira paresis, and to whom life's solemnest solemnities were a grimace and a grin. 'Tis ever thus, for human nature has been the same since the earliest ages began developing a monogram mania, when the sons of the stars first fascinated the daughters of men. Every true and honorable mob always holdsin scornful contempt each simplest symbol of constituted authority, especially when constituted by itself. Even so, all genuine soldiers felt obliged to fleer and jeer at everything hidden or concealed in that cavern of despair wherein our hero reigned. They gave him the marble heart in the loud three-em dash newspaper style of emphasis. They swore by the dorsal fins of a planked white fish that he was a paroxysmal, flamboyant fraud, and showered on him weird variations of the standard oriental malediction; may his countenance be inverted diagonal-wise, and donkeys browse on his grandmother's grave! They floated him to perdition hourly on the brimstone vapors of their anathema, and soon beckoned him back again in the renaissance of their whetted appetite. Then he assumed a fictitious importance, sufficient indeed in more recent times to have almost entitled him to arrive at a New York hotel.
Probably no Sutler's stock was ever submitted to the critical and crucial operation of an inventory, presided over by an expert accountant's freshly laundered mustache, andcold, cruel, thin-lipped smile. The variety of such an inventory would be as attractive as that of the village landlord's menu—ram, lamb, sheep and mutton. Its metaphysics would be unique as a bi-metallic understudy; its mathematics only less recondite than a census of the baccilli encysted in the buzzard's beak on a standard dollar, mintage of 'eighty-one. An exhaustive attempt, at the present day, to remedy this omission would certainly involve serious risk of undue spiritual exhilaration and intellectual intoxication. But a partial list, achieved at any specified stage of a vigorous campaign, would have read something like this:
Wooden combs and Mexican spurs.
Gutta-percha bivalves (cove).
Pretzels—prophetic of the hard, hard times which marked an era of Hoke Smith and Dink Botts statesmanship.
Effete cigars, bunch-grass filling, wrapped in genuine Havana onion leaves at Wethersfield, in the state of Connecticut.
Plug tobacco advanced in ossification.
Smoking ditto, premonitory of asbestos;infinite in capacity for provocation; imitating in incombustibility the sullen defiance of a dead, cold epigram.
Epsom salts.
Smoked herring, also salt.
Gingerbread, composted chiefly of sawdust, coal slack, tar, syrup and chopped feed.
Joke books, solemn as the summersault of the trick elephant in his dotage.
Cookies, tough enough to be handed down as heirlooms to the Weary Waggleses of futurity.
Rancid sardines, to be swallowed fin and scale, head and tail.
Pistol cartridges, watch keys, jack-knives, pills, and lead pencils conspicuous chiefly for brittleness.
Bologna sausages of the conglomerate era, petrified; like our glorious Union, invincible and indivisible.
Engine-turned pickles, submerged in carbolic acid and frosted with vitriol crystals; positively antiscorbutic.
Incohesive tooth-brushes cut loose from their base of supplies.
Long clay pipes after the form æsthetically affected by the honest Hollander, bibulous, amphibious and narcotic.
Dry figs and wormy raisins, savory as the juice of hard tack or tent-pin syrup.
Anonymous liquid perdition in sneaking disguises, which, judged by its taste, was a cheap grade ofspiritus strychniti, but judged by its price was molten pearl diluted with dissolved diamond.
Sundries, etc., etc.
Supposed necessaries of luxurious military existence some of these, more or less urgent even when subsisting on the enemy. In that case the conversion by assimilation of Confederate provender into Yankee bone and sinew was a delicious, romantic, patriotic, praiseworthy function. The patriots rather enjoyed this process, but they welcomed assistance from the foregoing catalogue.
Many articles were purchasable only in thosepost-pay-day periods when the center of financial gravity had been shifted by the exigencies of chuck-a-luck and old sledge from many pockets to one. It is an eminentlyusable list, resources permitting. Few of the impracticable inutilities of dollar stores or charity bazaars lift here their suspected forms, requiring us to exhaust all statutory and common-law remedies against conspiracy to do great bodily harm. Few of the frabbles are seen which adorn and dignify the dress-suit breakfast given by smirking domestic snobs to a titled foreign fraud, unintelligible as a Blavatsky theosophist. Yet even these, to the insatiate askers of the bivouc, would never quite suffice. Do what he could, the Sutler was ever fated to get himself disliked. A boy is a series of accidents at best. Some of the recruits in their haste to enlist forgot to provide themselves with a girl to leave behind. Those persons, unnerved by the bewildering entanglements of Hardee's tactics, and with no restorative compensations, were never satisfied. They were iron-jawed steam-talkers of calamity, perpetually assailing the walls of rebellion with huge explosions of wrath, and the flaps of the Sutler's tent with the roar of their grumbling. Deafening was their clamor for some absent staple to whichdistance lent the deceptive enchantment of a dining-car menu; deep their dismay that it was not held perennially on tap. Providence, assisted by timely hints from the wagon master, sometimes brought the supply trains within speaking distance by flag signal. But no discoverable influence ever succeeded in keeping a Sutler's stock up to high-water mark of gustatory demand. And all was in the ultimate cooked down to dire alternative of buy (or steal) and have, or do without and gnaw a file and swear.
As a rule the radiant and responsive Sutler embarked on his voyage militant with more or less capital and credit to back up the spirit of acquisitiveness which possessed him with all its quenchless inflammation. They were either his own, or that of the silent partner who procured his appointment, mayhap a modest and mouse-colored statesman from the remote suburbs, but whose identity was a secret between himself and high heaven. Both capital and credit were prone to evanescence equal to that of the pungent delicacy called quinine, sole sworn antidote to innumerablegastric plagues. They oozed as oozed insurgent hopes when Vicksburg fell, and the Confederacy, like the vail of Solomon's temple, was rent in twain. A balance sheet after one year's multiplication of tribulation, if the victim managed to survive that long, would usually disclose, on the one side, liabilities to the full extent of capital plus credit as aforesaid, the latter perhaps pitted with very large small-pox scars. On the other side was an array of dubious assets, embracing chiefly a tattered tent, a shattered wagon and a battered team, five hundred pounds of scorned sundries, sour and fusty, together with a fat ledger-full of "charges" against the killed, wounded and missing, who by a mysterious fatality had been his largest if not his only patrons. Hence this vexation that made him say things innocent youth should not be permitted to hear. Hence those tears, scalding even the nickel-steel armor of his cheeks. Therefore those sobs, soulful as if wrung from the viscera of a sixteen-dollar melodeon. Who hath hoarseness of voice? The tearful penitent afflicted withmouth-gout and knee-failure on the morning after a debauch; he speaks in muffled tones suggestive of a chastening headache. Who hath redness of eyes? Surely he that tarryeth long over a Sutler's trial balance, consecrated to the apotheosis of infinitesimals.
The Sutler was subject to a military discipline varying from the fierce precision of a Springfield rifle to the grotesque, picturesque and variegated eccentricities of an Austrian musket. He ranked a trifle lower than a mule, but a fraction higher than a corporal. In that principally, if mislaid or lost in action, he did not need to be officially accounted for in the returns like a mule, and would have slightly better prospects than a corporal of posthumous mutilation as to cognomen in the telegrams. The law recognized him and orders shielded him. That was theory. The veterans jeered at him as at the inexpressibly uncouth antics of the drafted raw disciple; everybody kicked and cursed and plundered him. That was practice. The difference was palpable as a headlight scarfpin; startling as the butcher's bill after a charge onrepeating rifle pits; significant as the evolution of a human female form divine from cowskin frock and burlap leggins of semi-savagery to high-shouldered polka-dot robings of advanced civilization—further exalted with a laudable ambition to improve the breed of pug puppies.
The Sutler had no status on parade, review or inspection. In the small tinkle and smear of preparatory smatter which preluded these symbolic mummeries, grewsome as tableaux of Chicago option matrimony (three years with the privilege of five), he was totally ignored. He was out of date like the hot biscuit of our ancestors with its yellow saleratus pungency—an auriferous bichloride of alkali. He was forgotten; full satisfaction guaranteed. When the long wavy or waveless tangent of bayonets, rustless or rusty as the case might be, stood forth aligned by a tempestuous adjutant with gestures mysterious and masonic, the unobtrusive Sutler, clothed in clouds of invisibility, affronted no tenderness of occult proprieties by any tangible revelation. He was out of sight, like the costumes of Tyroleanpeasantry, variegated with macaroni braidings. He was absent, conferring perhaps with some ragged Haggard from Coxeyville; terms private and no questions asked. When ambidextrous battalions broke by right of companies to the rear into column, and, emulating the conscious mastery of a Sampson hiving his mellifluous swarm in the lion's lordly breast, swept past the statuesque chief of review with resistless swing and strides invincible, he marched not! He sat in seclusion like the stage manager of a bicycle tournament; he rested in abeyance, scorched with scorn and broiling on hot epithets, in the stratified attitude of a listener trying to hear himself cogitate; he waited patiently, vibrating from gay to grave, from saucy to sincere; he lingered; no presents, no flowers. When the reckless inspector snapped hammers and jingled rammers and squinted inquisitively into muskets' murderous mouths, our friend the Sutler, profoundly versed in the preciousness of cautiousness, was nowhere seen. There was no hayseed in his brain; there were no flies on his intellect. With just enough body,perhaps, to serve as pretext for a soul to stay on earth, his great head was crowded from pit to dome with prudence. He had read of premature explosions and was satisfied; he had no wish to be wounded by an accidental discharge of his duty; to him eyesight was a poem and each finger a benediction; he was brave to recklessness, but even his minor members were precious; he blew into no muzzles, for safety is sweeter than fame; children half price.
The most startling of all war reminiscences perhaps was that revealed in far northern Michigan more than twenty years after Lee's surrender. A party of skaters built huge bonfires on thick ice and finally thawed out an imprisoned echo of bellum days, which cried impressively with the broad, plaintive, querulous, rebel accent of long ago: "All we want is to be let alone!" This current Confederate shibboleth expressed the luminous Sutler's abiding desire. Even when brass music stormed the camp as with whiffs of canister and grape, deluging all ears in torrents of harmonious discord, he failed to materialize. Suspicious of invidious comparison with thebluff drum major's majestic gorgeousness, he relieved the strain by withdrawing the infectious pestilence of his overshadowing personality. He vanished like a beautiful dream; relatives might call and learn something to their advantage. There were different opinions as to his whereabouts—but then it is difference of opinion that supports pool rooms as well as church choirs. Concord and discord were alike unheeded. The drum's glum rumble; the mighty trombone's round, reechoed roar; the feeble fierceness of cracked clarionet; the hissing tortures of the tormented horn tuned to the shrieks of lacerated souls; the witchbroth symphony from eye of newt and nose of frog and bar of gospel hymn that drips in blistering spirals out of tone-shattering fifes; the ghastly ground-swell's undertone that floats this fumid wreckage of assassinated sound upon its bleeding bosom—all these and other aggravated vibratory horrors searched for him vainly in the nooks and corners of a disgusted atmosphere. He was gone; front seats reserved for friends of the family.
Hence when, if ever, the Sutler shall be monumentalized in imperishable staff, it will be in none of those attitudes spectacular. An attitude of watchfulness, of expectancy, of expostulation, or of despair like one in last stages of the Baconian theory, were nearest truth to nature. The flashing outbreaks of his fiery mind, the sorrows of his overloaded heart, no carven stone or molded bronze can portray to skeptical contemporaries, or transmit to an undeserving, unbelieving posterity.
If the post of danger is the post of real honor, the Sutler has been scandalously overlooked in all awards. His assigned position at the rear during an advance, and in front during a retreat, fatally exposed him to depredations of the mixed society indigenous thereto. Encompassed with perils, a floating Atlantis mislaid in a cannibal archipelago, his only resource was rat-eyed vigilance and brass-breasted audacity. A recital of his exploits in defending the citadel wherein his precious perishables lay would shine with the story of Farragut lashed to a mast, or Hooker bombarding rainbows, a veritable torch-lightprocession down the dark avenues of history. Painting him in gaudy hues would be as unæsthetic as offering green goggles to a Delsarte club. But a mild touch of eulogy, a harmless ginger-pop effervescence of panegyric, may supposedly be ventured before we throw him on the tender mercies of posterity. Would Sir Patrick's famed toast to the "bloody 69th"—"The last in the field and the first to leave it; equal to none!" pass muster? If so, who will begrudge? None, we defiantly aver, unless it be some surviving marauder, overloaded with bias and twisted with prejudice until his withers are wrung, who once wore a half-shaved head for Sutler-burglary, then trod the brambly path of humiliation out of camp to the tune of "Rogue's March," while sad breezes sighed through rents in his respectability.
What a magnificent army that was, in which we served—one of the grandest in numerical strength, by far the grandest in its intelligence, its achievements and its inspiration, whereof the world holds record.
Ninus of Assyria, 2200 B. C., led againstthe Bactrians a force of 1,700,000 foot, 200,000 horse, and 16,000 chariots armed with scythes.
Cyrus besieged Babylon with 600,000 foot and 120,000 horse.
Italy, a little before Hannibal's time, was able to send into the field nearly 1,000,000 men. Yet Hannibal, during his campaign in Italy and Spain, plundered 400 towns and destroyed 300,000 people.
When Xerxes arrived at Thermopylæ his force by land and sea aggregated 2,641,610, according to Herodotus, a weighty worthy man, and worth his weight in sesterces.
January 1, 1861, the army of the United States consisted of nineteen regiments of all arms, numbering, present and absent, 16,402 officers and men. From April 1, 1861, to April 28, 1865, a monthly average of 56,000 men, a large army in itself, was recruited, equipped and supplied for the volunteer forces. At the last-named date 1,034,064 volunteers, after four years' casualties of war, were actually in the service. From first to last 2,678,967 men were mustered in, constituting 1,668regiments of infantry, 232 of cavalry and 52 of artillery—total 1,952 regiments. In three months, from May 7th to August 7th, 1865, a total of 640,806 troops were mustered out of service and restored to the ranks of productive citizenship. The cost of the war to the United States government has been measured in money at $3,963,159,751.15. The states in rebellion aggregated an area of 733,144 square miles, with 12,572 miles of navigable rivers, 2,523 miles of sea coast and 7,031 miles of inland boundary.
With these facts for a basis we may, if courageous, institute comparisons with the great events of history. Courage is essential. A page of fulminating statistics is as dangerous to the unwary as a loaded gun-boat floating with the current, cocked, capped and aimed below the water line. In a village ignorant of the science of the division of labor, one may get his child christened by the same artist who repaired his boots. In certain localities one may revel, so to speak, in the enjoyments of a broad phase of humor, based on fried onions, carbolized tar and commoditiesof that sort, or of a broad plane of sociability, based on plug tobacco, pint flasks and discussion of dog pedigrees. But in the higher realms of statistics, and other like researches, success depends upon the cultivation of devoted courage, courageous fortitude, and a subtle intellectuality intricate as the distorted diagram on the face of a moss agate.
Fenimore Cooper depicts the army Sutler of the Revolutionary contest as a woman; habitually Irish; rubicund, snuffy, blasphemous and addicted to gin—in brief an object of charity, socially and pecuniarily. She can be fitted out, without violence to probability, with an eye like a cross-section of hard boiled egg, and the shallow retreating brow of an ibex; also with cotton in her ears. Her clothing might easily have been fished out at random from a box of contributions to hailstorm sufferers. Her coquettish, curly locks were doubtless of oakum texture and solferino tinge. This much is conjectural, for when we read on and learn that she was the camp washerwoman we abandon the pursuit forthwith.Like flowers that bloom in the Japanese spring, she has nothing to do with the case. She vanishes like a congressman (before the czar era) constructively absent when a quorum is to be burst. The Sutler of our more refined war period was of the man masculine. No woman could have filled this requisition, even in those days of Brigham Young's multi-wife propaganda. No woman could have fought the good fight and kept the stock in such a crisis, even with her trousseau reduced to a calico basis. Where languorous lilies fill the eye with beauty, let the gentler sex abide. A woman in our Sutler's sphere would have been more useless than the horse that sustains superannuated relations to a fire department. She would have been more expensive than the funeral of a deceased statesman charged to the contingent fund; more dangerous than a damp basement. During twenty centuries, while among men the glorious Roman has degenerated into the monkey-tamer, woman, on the contrary, has greatly advanced. And the advanced woman has apparently come to stay. The ethereal creature who succumbedto tight lacing has vanished. A stronger, sterner class succeed. The manly miss comes forward, and her demands are something sumptuous. Nothing less than the mandarin's full yellow jacket and peacock feather will suffice. But the most fluent champion of uplifted femininity never dared to rise with a whir to claim this dizzy pre-eminence of a Sutlership. The cut of her garments may be virile and chic, still she aspired not so high. The bravest of meat-stall heroines, with slaughter-house eyes and leaf-lard complexion, may declaim suffrage syllogisms with the witchery of a South Missouri angel, and her young man may tear his hair in angry anguish at the thought, but Sutlerships transcend the ambition of both.
Of the man masculine was our Sutler. Not a woman. Neither a dude. No gallon of gall in a plaid suit, owed for, could have endured, for one short seething, scorching month, these multiplex ordeals of catastrophe. At the current quadrennial round-up of aspirants, when the internal revenue bung-smeller parades his political scars, the dude is sometimesseen—in the Sutler's tent never. He would have suffered all the agonies of a bullock threatened with corn-cob strangulation, and no compensatory convictions. It were better to be staked out in the legislative vestibule as custodian of cuspidors. We have been generous in extending the elective franchise to naturalized citizens and all who declare their intention to become such—probably too generous. We have encouraged foreign nations to work off their damaged and unsalable goods on us, in the immigrant line, as in other lines. But we have never been cruel. We have pitied the sorrows of our rich young man. We have certainly never been cruel enough to expose our helpless, inferior fellow-creatures, those curled darlings of dandydom, to vicissitudes like that of the Sutlership. That were an infamy fit to make the green goods gouge and the gold brick trick eminently respectable by comparison. Dudes have their function. So have train-boys and other calamities. So have rose sherbet and chewing gum; so have lambrequins and doilies. But not in war time.Neither they nor any other gin-fizz effervescence of intangible ephemera. Their fate in such surroundings would be sad as that of the tough but meritorious army mule, who survived all war's perils, and thirty years later shattered his hind leg, from hoof to hip, on the chin of a traveling highwines apostle from Louisville. There was absolutely no place for the dude in our army life. The velvet of his voice would speedily roughen. One week of hard bread would ruin his teeth; one day's rasp of the wind would utterly devastate his complexion. The rural visitor who begins his city experiences by being piloted to a bunco bank, and ends them by being piloted to a pawn-shop, would encounter no more swift, inglorious career. The horrors of the zero season are intensified when the man with a cold in his head insists on discussing financial issues with us at every turn. The inconveniences of army life were pronounced enough, as it was, without the further infliction of the dreadful dude, in Sutler's trains or elsewhere. Nay, verily! This small erratum of nature, this insectiverous insignificance, had no placeor function there. Heredity endowed him with an intellect requiring a three months' vacation four times a year, and fate left him to the full enjoyment thereof. Fortunately for the credit of this nation the rebellion was efficiently and sufficiently suppressed without his infinitesimal assistance.
It is a sad and significant fact that the navy had no Sutlers. The sailors and marines missed the picturesque inspiration of his ministering service; the exuberant and perennial freshness of his presence; the sounding brass of his tickling symbols. Our surviving web-footed compatriots modestly demand that due recognition be accorded their important branch of the belligerent forces. In making and enforcing claims to our attention, their honest clamor fills the sea-coast air, from Greenland's icy icebergs to Charleston's shifting sands. And they have right. Did not each base of our supplies rest on a waterway patrolled by gunboats? Were not all our armies named from streams along which their fraternal tin-clads trolleyed and thundered? Was not brave Jack always ready,manning the yards, when we fell back for reinforcements, and the like, to receive us with three cheers and a Dartmouth yell? Did not the Monitor, that grand old frigate, without a sail, a mast, a rope, a stem, a stern, a yardarm or a bowsprit, steam straight into the core of our hearts, and ram her chilled steel nostrils far and away into the realms of historic muse?
The naval veteran of to-day, working his chin industriously to keep his teeth tight and vigorously dodging as best he may the wiles of the world, the flesh and the politicians, complains at times that scant allusion crops out in war reunions to episodes wherein he figures lustrously. Here let full justice be freely done. For Farragut and Foote and Porter, for Dupont, Dahlgren, and a hundred more, and all their thousands of devoted, daring shipmates, let honors thicken with the passing years, and glories brighten as the centuries roll on! The same glad impulse burned within their breasts; the same great triumphs gilded their endeavor. Their manners and methods differed widely fromours, but in aim and motive we are one. It is their good fortune never to have known how much they lost in having not the solace of the Sutler. It was not their fault.
The young recruit, christened Zephaniah, was not responsible therefor, because he experienced his origin at a period when he was powerless to direct results. If good people would only learn to vote as they pray, it might possibly be different. But let even a marine run up against a brace game in Dead Man's Gulch, and permanent enlightenment is liable to eventuate. And when the atmosphere of our homes grows mephitic with the odor of satanic journalism, we may perhaps awaken to the danger of cultivating depravities that are calculated to stimulate a boom in the brimstone market.