HUMOR OF THE BATTLEFIELD.
Many humorous incidents, says a writer in theCentury Magazine, occurred on battlefields. A Confederate colonel ran ahead of his regiment at Malvern Hill, and, discovering that the men were not following him as closely as he wished, he uttered a fierce oath and exclaimed: “Come on! Do you want to live forever?” The appeal was irresistible, and many a poor fellow who had laughed at the colonel’s queer exhortation laid down his life soon after.
A shell struck the wheel of a Federal fieldpiece toward the close of the engagement at Fair Oaks, shivering the spokes and dismantling the cannon. “Well, isn’t it lucky that didn’t happen before we used up all our ammunition,” said one of the artillerists as he crawled from beneath the gun.
When General Pope was falling back before Lee’s advance in the Virginia Valley, his own soldiers thought his bulletins and orders somewhatstrained in their rhetoric. At one of the numerous running engagements that marked the disastrous campaign, a private in one of the Western regiments was mortally wounded by a shell. Seeing the man’s condition, a chaplain knelt beside him, and, opening his Bible at random, read out Sampson’s slaughter of the Philistines with the jaw-bone of an ass. He had not quite finished, when, as the story runs, the poor fellow interrupted the reading by saying: “Hold on, chaplain. Don’t deceive a dying man. Isn’t the name of John Pope signed to that?”
A column of troops was pushing forward over the long and winding road in Thoroughfare Gap to head off Lee after his retreat across the Potomac at the close of the Gettysburg campaign. Suddenly the signal officer who accompanied the general in command discovered that some of his men, posted on a high hill in the rear, were reporting the presence of a considerable body of Confederate troops on top of the bluffs to their right. A halt was at once sounded, and the leading brigade ordered forward to uncover the enemy’s position. The regiments were soon scrambling up the steep incline, officers and men gallantly racing to see who could reach the crest first. A young lieutenant and some half dozen men gained the advance, but at the end of what they deemeda perilous climb they were thrown into convulsions of laughter at discovering that what the signal men took for Confederate troops were only a tolerably large flock of sheep. As the leaders in this forlorn hope rolled on the grass in a paroxysm of merriment they laughed all the louder at seeing the pale but determined faces of their comrades, who, of course, came up fully expecting a desperate hand-to-hand struggle. It is perhaps needless to say the brigade supped on mutton that evening.
As the army was crossing South Mountain the day before the battle of Antietam, General McClellan rode along the side of the moving column. Overtaking a favorite Zouave regiment, he exclaimed, with his naturalbonhommie: “Well, and how is Old Fifth this evening?” “First-rate, General,” replied one of the Zouaves. “But we’d be better off if we weren’t living so much on supposition.” “Supposition?” said the General, in a puzzled tone. “What do you mean by that?” “It’s easily explained, sir. You see we expected to get our rations yesterday; but as we didn’t, we’re living on the supposition that we did.” “Ah, I understand; you shall have your rations, Zouzous, to-night,” replied the General, putting spurs to his horse to escape the cheers of his regiment. And he kept his promise.