The Army Mule and Other War Sketches Part 5

THE SHELTER TENT

III

l.u.s.trous among war's unfading reminiscences shines the contour of the Shelter Tent. It lingers in memory, unique and delectable, dissimilar but equivalent to our ideal of those fringed silken pavilions wherein apoplectic despots of the orient air their scandalous magnificence amid the frockless squalor of their cringing hordes.

The Shelter Tent was a supplement to the original scheme for putting down the rebellion--a fact, as it were, _dehors_ the record. Only after Bull Run and Shiloh and Antietam and Iuka was the government nerved to the point of requiring its soldiery to shoulder their houses like mollusks, and thus relieve the tuneful, uncomplaining mule of a sore responsibility.

This was an innovation whose dam was Necessity, and whose sire was held to be some emissary of Satan, with an unearned increment of prestige in the counsels of Halleck, general-in-chief, so-called. It was evolved as the molecule evolves protoplasm and from a plastic cell developeth primordial germs. Versatile scorners, voluble as advocates of artesian irrigation, promptly scheduled its pedigree for generations up and down. Minutest of constructed residences for living humanity, save perhaps the half-credible tub of tough Diogenes, it won a way into our reluctant liking that vindicates its t.i.tle to consideration among the factors of ultimate victory. You may pay the doctor to diagnose and also to prescribe, but you must subsidize the pharmacist before relief is possible.

Most portable of mundane mansions, its very littleness relieved the situation of numberless infelicities,--specifically, of servitude to servants, whether apple-cheeked daughters of Denmark, or saddle-colored Cantonese with eyes cut bias and a Pacific Mail subsidy lingo not on speaking terms with veracity. Likewise other infelicities which relegate housekeeping to the level of a cantharides blister, and which make court corridors ring with the battle-cry for freedom shouted by luckless suitors who married in haste to repent at Sioux Falls.

The Shelter Tent of the war for the Union, so waged, as aforementioned, is said to have been a French device. We shall introduce no evidence in reb.u.t.tal. It was unquestionably steeped to the hem in martial economics. It was calculated to rob a miser of all that life holds dear. The force of dire frugality could no step farther go. In the mult.i.tude of counselors there is distraction, for existence, like a court-house, is full of trials. But all agree on this question of economy. We lead the world, but the French lead us in these little every-day parsimonies. It was cheap but grand. Beecher once a.s.serted that flowers are the grandest things G.o.d ever made without putting an immortal soul into them. Beecher had evidently at that time never treated his optic nerve to a vision of the useful, un.o.btrusive Shelter Tent.

Woven of white cotton spun to fascine rigidity, sometimes gutta-perchaed to counterscarp imperviousness, its flat measurement but squared an average soldier's stature. When the whirl of recoil developed into a torrent of flight, it was scarcely cla.s.sed with _impedimenta_.

A weed is said to be only a plant whose uses have not yet been discerned. This square of cotton was to the unsophisticated military discernment first a weed, then a spear, then a full-grown corn in the ear--yea, verily! sh.e.l.led and in the sack, distilled and in the cut-gla.s.s decanter, with accessories duly accessible.

Styled "tent" in the sardonic nomenclature of our nomadic days, it was in sober verity a wrap, a cape, a kirtle or a poncho, which only by connected duplication and reduplication came within the pale of that sonorous t.i.tle. Only ten men are permitted to exist on earth at once competent to read and understand Plato. Thus precious is equilibrium in a world where the fragment of a donkey jaw has slain thousands.

Fewer doubtless would divine at first blush how a square of cotton fabric, set down one side with b.u.t.tons and holes to match cut opposite, could suffice for each warrior's allotment of habitation in embryo. Still fewer would devise, until Necessity, doting maternal ancestor of rarest constructive genius, came to compel, the forms and structures of abode that lay susceptible within that so innocent appearing segment of a textile web, white, friendly and tractable.

Thus history goes on, dancing through the airy nothingness of experiment, dainty as a harebell, graceful as a fawn.

Of what the Shelter Tent had and had not, commended curiosity makes now minute interrogation. It had neither veranda nor portico; if offenses must come, woe to them whereby. No latticed porchway tempted humming birds to linger in its honeysuckle haunts. The bay-window that biteth like a serpent and stingeth like a cactus when the bill comes in, was conspicuously non-existent. Its architectural flippancies were few indeed. No fluted town hall pillars nor St. Gauden's blush-promoting statuary decorated its blameless exterior, either for botch or betterment. No black closets fanged with sharp hooks and breathing pestilent mustiness lurked in its dreadful depths, threatening to precipitate a ministerial crisis around the conjugal hearth.

The man of far western enterprise, who goes forth with nothing but a few ounces of salt in one hand and a halter in the other to a career of sudden and certain prosperity, would sneer at a plan for his rustic villa of content so void of all embellishment. The rampant eastern egotist, saturated with profound, uncanny mysticism, would echo the supercilious sentiment.

Guiltless of tapestry, even of paper tattooed into isosceles triangles or fretted with peafowl tintages, were its walls. Nay, vetoed were walls indeed, save when some mad riot of sumptuousness inspired an imitation of "society"--that medley of metaphysics and flirtations, of fashion, vanity, jealousy, altruism, rheumatism and gastronomy which is princ.i.p.ally intent on beating tom-toms and dodging jim-jams. Then, hoisted above its normal alt.i.tude, like sliding roof of clover rick, a rough joinery of boards or logs or turf, breasted it up four-square to all the gusts of Boreas and the moral agencies of southern Arkansaw.

No door-plate shimmered, purporting, in gothic undecipherables gnarly as Pharaoh's lean kine, to name the occupant. Good cause, forsooth; none better! No door, on which a faintest shimmer could be hung, graced the wide frontal vacancy. Who entered here, though his brow were tall and his spirit strong, left his _bon-ton_ behind. Style, root of much heart-break and hen-peck, was smitten as by the stony paw of a sphinx. Fit symbols of existence in this pretenseless home were the broken column and the gates ajar.

Dest.i.tute also was the Shelter Tent of the pompous excrescence of chimneys, and their accessories,--of the parlor mantel, laden with sea-sh.e.l.ls and aconite pellets,--of the stove in the guest chamber, voluble in prophecies of smokeless combustion, unhopeful as the courting of a gra.s.s-widow with an inchoate right of dower to forty acres of swamp land in a school section,--of the hanging book-shelf, heavy with dull fiction and smeared with poetical syrup. No chimney was there to witness the woes of perplexed Santa Claus. No chimney was there to gaze with wide-eyed wonder on the tragedy which ensues when Uncle Reuben blows out the gas. No chimney was there, with open gusty grate, more dreary than the lignite desolation of the bad lands.

Minus likewise were chandeliers, with their brazen sheen,--mementos of dismal experience with colicky infants at paregoric time,--mementos of sweltering social hilarity, when perspiration is unconfined and heels smite corns on toes that groan again,--mementos of genteel functions, where pink and purple ice cream circulates at par, and French-plate diamonds flash on palpitating bosoms perilously exposed to the weather.

Chandeliers were extinct and non-existent. Candles stuck in bayonets sufficed. There was light enough for a nightly prosecution of the poker industry and for overproduction of the chestnut crop. And even after taps, when utter darkness reigned, there was no danger of b.u.mping one's head against the upper berth.

No walls of part.i.tion parceled off the Shelter Tent into s.p.a.ces conventionalized to pecular functions. Aristocracy of exclusion and seclusion there were none, but broad and limpid democracy of exposure to all curiousness, though searching as croton oil. Hence drawing-room, boudoir and kitchen, oratory, refectory, and lavatory were all in one. But only in alternation, since the contracted area precluded simultaneousness as well as lat.i.tudinarianism. There was no disgraceful scramble for the apartment with southern exposure and all modern conveniences. There was little risk of bringing a blush of modesty to the veteran's bronzed and ma.s.sive cheek. Part.i.tions would have been useless as a pop factory in the bluegra.s.s region. Each tenant was the peer in imperturbability of a male divorcee in Connecticut, digging clams to earn alimony.

Area was not its boast. A well equipped farm on the Little Missouri is said to consist of a due allowance of sunny sky, a pair of bob-sleds and a gopher hole. There naturally prevail the financial views which demand a currency based on pig-iron, short-ribs, hoop-poles and wheat screenings.

No lightning-rod adorned its frowning pediment, lank and fatiguing reminder of Ben Franklin,--thrifty printer,--and his kite, such as never was before in air or tree; also of the glib and evanescent vendor whose monopoly of all fascinations was only equaled by his absolute prostration of all moral attributes. That convoluted metallic insufficiency thrust not its aluminum barb above the crest of this domicile, like a reed shaken by the wind, mute witness to each pa.s.ser of the owner's sweet credulity.

Trifling in weight, as was each segment of the Shelter Tent, unappreciable addition to individual burden, and willingly borne for the increased facility and certainty of bivouac, the aggregate relief to the department of transportation was like shriving a bad man's conscience of crime or lifting a fear from a coward's soul. The reduction of regimental trains from thirteen wagons to three was as efficient in ultimate results as the withdrawal of guards from confederate poultry-coops and the obliteration of zouave jackets; possibly more so.

The Shelter Tent was the after-glow of an understudy, so to speak, but it was a potent helper in the grand tragedy. It came into war annals greeted with a welcome warm as that vouchsafed on election night to the missing precinct that brings the necessary majority. This welcome was tendered when use brought due appreciation of its value, not earlier. Its original introduction was as sensational as when John Barleycorn comes to town, and brings his blizzard with him. Its first arrival met with jeers; with hot reviling; with barkings imitative of indignant dog, or brayings as of disgusted donkey; with cursings such as tear the curser's lungs to ragged tatters; with mellowing miracles of profanest speech, horizonless trans-continental sentences of words hurled endlong, overthwart, each word a stab or blister; with mutiny and riot ludicrous to recall. But all in vain. Reeking language, that put immortal souls in peril, availed nothing.

The Shelter Tent came for use, and it came to stay. Orders were imperative and discipline was supreme. Jeering, barking, braying, cursing, rioting were as futile as the purr of a Va.s.sar kitten at the advent of a long-haired aesthete, wearing an air of discontent and a coat with efflorescent elbows.

It was prescribed and issued. The average visitor to Washington is welcomed to his nation's proud capital with loud acclaim by the hack fiend and the hotel runner, both Afro-American. The Shelter Tent was welcomed with corresponding warmth, as aforesaid, when its utility began to materialize. Out into the pink and pearl of morning sunshine, or into a sour, dreary, morning drizzle, step from it the tentmates of a night's camp. They were proud as the Jerseyman who boasts his descent "from the family of Smith-Smiths, connected by a syphon." They were free from the proverbial weary, next-morning-condition of civil life, for sleep profound had knitted up the raveled stocking heel of care. Each carried a moiety of homestead folded in the knapsack strapped to his stalwart form, and stepped out with a sublime song of triumph on his lips and in his heart. Each carried his own house. He also laughed at his own jokes with a loud tenor tone. Marvel of more than this marvelous facility of home-shifting was our inimitable volunteer. He bore constantly also his year's wardrobe and his week's provender, toothsome (though less tender) as planked whitefish from the cold and cla.s.sic a.s.siniboin. Likewise, his drink, his tools tonsorial, manicurial and dentifric, such as fate vouchsafed and regulations permitted. In addition he bore his bed, his financial capital and surplus, his a.r.s.enal of projectiles, his weapons of offense, his instruments of torture, and his implements of toil.

Strength considered, no pack-horse carried a weightier lading, and yet the soldier was denied the dull, dumb creature's exemption from rational accountability.

Thus freighted with belligerent melange the mobilized veteran marches all day, with his thinking bayonet at his side, his logical musket on his shoulder, and his profane vocabulary held in measurable subjection, the nominative agreeing with the verb occasionally by accident.

On through hot and bitter limestone dust that blanches all his cuticle, then reddens eyes and nose and mouth with unsanctified inflammation. On through floundering quagmires of yellow mud that settles into slush, then slumps into slime; vivid parallel to the moral collapse of a white-souled commissary warmed by beams of opportunity and trodden by hoofs of temptation.

On through heat excruciating or cold unendurable; through rain, sleet, hail,--storm's dread alternations of discomfort,--all the lengthening day, his trousers shrinking to knee-pants as he trudges along. On, footsore and halting, each nerve a roadway for pain's burning steps, each bone racked with rheumatic twinges, until night brings the limping turnpike tourist to a welcome resting-place.

The bivouac then, and full-orbed glory of the Shelter Tent! Matchless for adaptation, it is pitched as soon as ranks are broken. The landscape whitens with swift magic like a Monday's clothes-line billowy with confidential raiment. The tentmates join the sundered segments, and with sticks or stalks or poles, or, lacking these, with bayonet and gun and ramrod, lift the flexile sheet to the required angle, and lo! their dwelling stands confessed; no spectacular monstrosity, but compact, cleanly and stylish as a salad dressed in oil.

Hasty, most hasty, also of formalities and frills devoid, the varied events which thereupon eventuate. The search for wood and water, energetic as the pace of reckless engineer, who goes by the meeting point at a mile and a half a minute calling for more steam. The ablutions, rich in doleful reminiscence of rare and radiant days at home when the brow was wiped with cabbage leaves or cotton waste; vivid with memories of the printing-house towel that hangs by the door.

The cooking simple and savory; the cook with a look of far-away Georgia in his face, across whose peaceful breast salt waves of trouble roll, but from whose humble lips no back-talk comes. The mastication, almost as irritating as cla.s.sical music, save as spiced with time-honored facetiae wrested from some wrecked parthenon; long-distance jokes that would bore easily through an inch plank and kill at random.

Drinking straight and plain from the flat but priceless old canteen, out of whose limpid depths, with a gurgling capacity of one miner's inch per second, are drawn exhaustless liquid refreshments that shame the isles of Greece, the hills of Spain, the purple heaven of Rome,--in dreams thou livest on! Above all, post-prandial exercise of dry dishwashery with a chip, exuding bicarbonate of turnpike dust; one touch of water makes the whole camp grin.

Then comes, with briefest interlude for rest, or recreation, or knocking out spot after spot of the decalogue on the sly, swift preparation for the few, short hours of nocturnal repose; profound as a policeman with clews to a stabbing mystery; dreamless as some cold-sliced fragment of the long ago, sitting pa.s.sionless through chasing, racing ages. Tentmates are nervous with the fatigues of march and nettlesome as bibulous companions in civil life, who quarrel about trifles slight as hair; then settle their quarrels over a round of the rosy; and finally quarrel afresh as to who shall liquidate for the liquor.

The night may be moonlit, starry, glum as a ghoul, dark as black bullocks of Galloway, or terrible with thunder-bursts and drenching rains and blowing of great guns. Valor is an indeterminate essence; at times the essence will ooze; much depends on the status; few men are supremely valorous in the dark.

Plato considered that woman was intended to do the same things as man, only not so well. It is currently suspected, however, that women can fight better than their brothers in that grewsome darkest hour which just precedes the dawn, when so many attacks are planned which mostly fail. Exceptions should possibly be noted in favor of the emanc.i.p.ated female trotting out of her cla.s.s; specially against the timid man who has been dragged all night over loose stones, at the tail of a wild nightmare.

Sleep comes at last, and the camp sounds lull, not startle; peaceful, innocent, harmless as the fresh-laid humorist pleading for a little more civilization among the higher cla.s.ses. Soporific is the sentry's slow, reluctant Amsterdam tramp, as he strides, bemoiled by the long day's detritus, wrapped mostly in the wailing winds; also the electric interurban symphony of snorings manifold, which care not one coreless clam what nationality stands guard to-night; the weird signals of the fond melodious mule struggling with anchylosis of thoracic articulation, and betimes bursting into an effort that saturates seven cubic miles of atmosphere with familiar mule music in seventeen seconds; the melancholy squeak of a belated sutler's wagon, grinding out its a.s.sent to the maxim that a linch-pin in time saves an axle; the hoot of a discontented owl in branches not remote; the howl of expostulatory cur in distant farm-yard; the intercepted shriek of far off poultry, prey of some army prowler who strews the ground with severed heads and hot red spurts of gore.

Soporific is all this medley of celluloid resonance; softer than the first symptoms of velvety resistance on a youth's lip; smoother than the etiquette of a square meal at a round-table; provocative all of serenest, soundest sleep, until joyless reveille shall come, summoning from iridescent dreams to another day of inglorious unromantic toiling--double column at half distance and then double distance on half rations.

Through long, drowsy summer afternoons comes luscious _deshabille_ of relaxation, born of an a.s.sured half-week's unthreatened encampment serenity. Then the _recherche_ loungers in the Shelter Tent, clinking their useless double-eagles together with capitalistic nonchalance, revel in tutti-frutti visions of banished splendors and foresworn delights. Those bright single-gold-standard days haunt us still, with the persistence of a sixty winter damsel in her frosty bloom. The cribbed and coffined quarters expand into peopled vistas of epicurean magnificence, elusive and deceptive as a tax on dinner pails. Therein the mirage of gorgeous furnishings alternates or mingles with the phantasm of delicate potables, with a bewildering miscellaneousness that recalls Aga.s.siz's dictum on the impossibility of reconciling American stratifications.

Throw physic to the dogs--they need thinning out anyhow, but preserve your hallucinations; four generations of gentility are required to produce a boy without freckles. P. S. Give the negro a chance! Eighty generations barely sufficed to evolve a white man capable of inventing the postage stamp. Just four hundred years were occupied by the whites in conquering the Indians, with the powerful aid of rum, gunpowder and Indian agents.

As we remarked, the furnishings of these visions were extremely gorgeous. Cashmere, Bokarra and Khivan rugs bespread the marqueterie floors. Also, delicate the potables. Ragouts, chow-chow, dinde glace, truffles, soquille, sorbot, terrapin, sauterne, cognac and extra dry cover the beckoning tables; nectar, nectar everywhere and every drop imbibable. Imported, perhaps, through Signor Sp. Frumenti, of Genoa.

Behold priceless bijoux of Louis Quinze,--buhl, Sevres, Limoges, Dalton, and Royal Vienna; treasures of ormolu and ivory, and Carrara; wonders of faience and Satsuma; quaint carvings from Padua, Tokio, Delhi and Antwerp, in ebony or sandal or teak or immemorial oak! All for ornament rather than utility, like the ears of a mule which have been stationed too far in front for wings, and too high up for fly-scares. Here are poems in bra.s.s, anthems in eternal bronze, pastorals in Dresden, mythologies in the grinning idols of Cathay, miracles in Gobelin and Daubisson; relics of the by-flown, fly-blown past, before the great, red dragon of Wall street had been hatched and hated.

There are scimiter and falchion from the days of Lionheart, inwrought with golden arabesque by fezzed wizards in Teheran. There are poniards, it may be, reviving proud, glad, gladiatorial days, when men were muscled like the brawny, aged hen. They fought with b.l.o.o.d.y bludgeons long and well; or with sharp rapier carved the lion's liver from his agile frame, while smiling beauty munched the Roman caramel and saw with tearless lid the brave ones sink beneath hard blows more deadly than the modern pie.

Here swing hangings more valued than jewels; silk woven in the caliphs' harems; yellowing marvels of Chantilly; glowing glories of Corot and Daubigny, Gerome, Vibert, Meissonier, Millais or Rembrandt--unequaled as to flesh tints; superior even to most chromos.

Ah, yes! Roast venison, fried chicken, stuffed oysters, broiled lobster, sausage with sauerkraut, beefsteak and onions on the half sh.e.l.l. The mills of the cooks grind slowly, but they grind, even though their recipes be less intelligible than the personal recollections of a giraffe.

All these things float and allure and dazzle and tempt in the soaring fancy of the dilettante militant, who is lifted from a deep dark Hamlet melancholy to semi-celestial alt.i.tudes. But a drum-tap or a horse-neigh brings him down with a dull thud to the cramped coa.r.s.e environment where he is tethered like an uneasy Indian restricted to a mental reservation. Blessed is the voluptuousness of reverie; blessed and cheap as an expectant clothier's greeting, while he pauses ecstatically for an appropriate smile; blessed and safe as flirting by telephone with a centripetal divinity at the exchange, sweet-voiced, invisible and anonymous; blessed but unsatisfying as a tariff reform bill stuffed with local concessions.

From roseate fantasy to grim realism is a tumble sharp and sudden to the dreamer in the Shelter Tent.

His ormolu and bijoutry consist of a deformed pocket mirror and a foreshortened pipe black as bombazine grief. His floor is honest old earth, rugless, plankless, naked as a marble Venus and cold as New England culture.

His decorated couch of down and carved mahogany, ebony inlaid, is superseded by a blanket and six fence-rails--rails quilled with keen splinters like the frightful porcupine; blanket harboring fecund colonies of that fraternal insect whose tentacles are inextricably entangled with every shuddering recollection of army vicissitudes; inescapable, inexpungable, yet nameless here forever more.