The Army Mule and Other War Sketches Part 3

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 s.p.a.ce where the tail should be; tasteless as fried smelts; thankless as opening a mint sauce to the free coinage of lamb. The chappie fellows who flutter at functions and t.i.tter 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 a.s.serted 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 princ.i.p.ally 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 pa.s.sed on, beaten with many stripes, to that mult.i.tudinous aggregation called an army, where human atoms, swarming and wriggling to the music of bra.s.s 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 una.s.suming, 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 turnpike dust, 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 higher than 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 ears were 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 banner becomes 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 l.u.s.tre 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 the dimless future; flag of freedom; flag of the world!

Washed in the blood of the brave and the blooming, s.n.a.t.c.hed 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.

THE SUTLER

II

Now the 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 incert.i.tude 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 sh.o.r.e 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 hoa.r.s.e 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 t.i.tles were very effective disguises. The ecclesiastical monitor, 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 a.s.sistance of his sleeve. The hea.r.s.e 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 that the 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 ma.s.sacre 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 G.o.dliness 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 rect.i.tude, a self-lubricating egotism, and exactly the minimum of soul that serves in lieu of salt to save his carca.s.s 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's stock 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 bra.s.s b.u.t.tons alone weighed over a thousand tons! No Sutler was ever drafted into that army. Hence no Sutler ever hired a subst.i.tute 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 subst.i.tute. 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 a.s.set 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 acc.u.mulated 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, surrept.i.tious, 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 pet.i.tioned 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 c.o.o.n 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 h.o.a.ry 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 that brushes 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 of _facetiae_, 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 not afraid 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 compet.i.tor 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; b.u.t.termilk for dyspeptic opulence. Beverages more pungent, searching and responsive were in demand at the Sutler's tent. He trafficked within complex circ.u.mscriptions; 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 b.l.o.o.d.y hands to an inhospitable calamity. No country cross-roads grocer's a.s.sortment was his, reeking with pestiferous perfume of salt fish and sauerkraut; filling the air with a d.u.c.h.ess 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 of _non-desiderata_, vast as the outfit of the greatest show on this or any other 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 acc.u.mulated 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 holds in scornful contempt each simplest symbol of const.i.tuted authority, especially when const.i.tuted 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 appet.i.te. Then he a.s.sumed a fict.i.tious importance, sufficient indeed in more recent times to have almost ent.i.tled 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, and cold, 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 d.i.n.k Botts statesmanship.

Effete cigars, bunch-gra.s.s 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 antis...o...b..tic.

Incohesive tooth-brushes cut loose from their base of supplies.