The Army Mule and Other War Sketches Part 7

The lieutenants, with authority varying inversely as the square of their b.u.mptiousness, are loud in their pretensions as the howl of a defeated candidate who has fallen outside his breastworks. Mrs.

Solomon in all her several hundred glories was not elaborated like one of these. Invincible Chicago, with the biggest and tallest Masonic temple in the world, by thunder, is not so proud. The triumphant statesman who has evolved a barley schedule that will put the robber barons of western Iowa to open shame, is no more inflated. The congressman who has exposed a rival's political armor-plate, honeycombed with blowholes, is less exultant. State linked to state, in goodly fate, in mart and mint and mine; in rolling plain of golden grain or toss of plumy pine--none of these could fabricate a more colossal national glorification than these imposing subalterns, with ravenous tools of butchery girt on their semi-erect forms, and fiercely fretful lest the rebellion should be suppressed before they could debouch upon the ensanguined scenery.

The captain is big with the fate of empire. He has dwelt upon the agonizing spectacle of his beloved country bleeding at every vein, not to mention the carotid and celluloid arteries, _et cetera_, until he has acc.u.mulated an amount of frenzy which only blood of a highly oxygenized quality and in most generous libations can ever expect to satisfy. The candidate with a separate and distinct set of views on all crucial questions for each county in his district may pa.s.s muster on the civil arena, but this centurion is vehemently in earnest. He has supped on a thousand horrors--remember the number.

His eye is one gleaming chrysolite. His lips are pink and luminous, dripping phosph.o.r.escent formulas in characterizing the a.s.sailants of the flag. His mustache bristles with fury like the rays of an arc lamp shooting pulsations of glow into unresisting darkness. His nose sniffs battles from afar and threatens direful death in each resounding sneeze. His brow is knit into knots of perplexity by chasing tactic combinations which canter at will through the vasty thought-clefts of his gray matter, foreboding a fatty degeneration thereof. His fervid soul thirsts for the hour when he shall lead his eager men to regions where bounteous crops of glory are harvested semi-monthly from valor's fertile fields. No pent up Schenectady contracts his grand ambition. But his torch is illuminative, not strictly conflagrational, after all.

The major and lieutenant-colonel blush bright crimson with the burden of unwonted dignities. These bucolic ex-potentates from outlying precincts, cross-road lawyers, perhaps, of the pig-replevin, breachy-steer cla.s.s, are limp supernumeraries in all this busy ebullition. Marvel not that they mutter unprintable ideas as they pa.s.s along. Each has now a clawing consciousness of his approximation to the infinitely little--the cube root of nothing. Each has squandered sixty dollars, the savings of a lifetime, in the purchase of the prescribed habiliments.

Now both find themselves eclipsed by a colored sport among the on-lookers, who displays a loud check suit and screaming scarlet necktie, enameled white shoes with black tips, and tall white hat swathed in a broad black band. Suppressed and quenched they stand, half-daft, with a glimmering recognition of their own marvelous inutility; nerveless as the ecclesiastical victim of Christmas generosity who has seventeen turkeys, in various stages of decomposition, lying on his back porch.

But the colonel! Great son of Mars, swathed in fire and thunder! Every sublime and momentous prerogative of this ill.u.s.trious occasion finds its prescriptive focus in his person. Lucifer, son of the morning--he will rise to the occasion or break a nerve in the effort! Lifted by approved, unchallenged primacy above all mediocre surroundings, he stands wrapped in the rampant amplitude of his own perpendicularity.

His dignity is frigid as the icicles on the fateful blizzard's beard in those frosty northwest winters when the coyote ceases yelping and the gopher is at rest. His serenity can calmly smile at Satan's wrath and force a frowning fraud. He speaks an imitation West Point idiom with the Tippecanoe accent, and his voice rivals in resonance the venturous wild-fowl honking high in air. His mental endowments have never been enervated by book gluttony and lesson bibbing. He is no patent process product of enlightened educational methods. He is a symmetrical outgrowth, so accepted and recognized by all, including himself.

Physically and intellectually he looms and glooms and towers. On him all glances are centered; toward him all thoughts are stretched; for him all hearts palpitate. Hector arming for the siege of Troy was boy's play in comparison. The embryo soldiery regard him with pride; admiring citizens look on him with poorly concealed reverence. He has already trimmed his corns to fit a major-general's shoes. Consequently his shoulders stiffen with pardonable arrogance; his gaze flashes soul-satisfaction in radiant smileful beams, and the ginger is hot in his mouth.

These are the ingredients out of which, in the alembic of his genius, the adjutant, perspiring like a wedding guest come to celebrate the climax of a happy disaster, must fuse a Dress Parade. His task is difficult as that of teaching a war ship how to swim. These are the bristling units, which, when he swings his commands around and over them, will submit their centripetence to his awecompelling centrifugence. They are flexible as a rubber currency, that can be expanded and inflated at will, if handled with care. But in the end they will stand approximately aligned, ready to skip on light bombastic toe, to wheel and whirl, to march or halt, to strike or slay.

Let not the drum major, gaudy as a calico cat, and his melodious cohort, be forgotten. This cohort may be composed of small boys executing Yankee Doodle with variations on snare drums and whistling sticks, or of fluffy adults, agitating the atmosphere with resonant trombone and shrieking piccolo. That is largely a matter of natural selection,--that is to say, of accident. But it is always obtrusive as a mourning costume expressly designed to advertise a quenchless woe and save expenses generally. And it is always marshaled by a fierce brobdingnag mounting a tall bearskin shako, and twirling a nickel-plated besom staff with the dapper legerdemain of a sword-swallower.

This so-called "band" is as imperative in the saturnalia of Dress Parade as a demijohn in an Iowa closet. In that province water that contains only 32,000 microbes to the cubic inch has been scientifically approved as a beverage--provided just enough brandy is added to take the cruelty out of the water. Without the band, parade would be a piebald abstraction, unthinkablest of impossibles. With it obstacles vanish and everything bursts into buoyant feasibleness and stem-winding accuracy, wrapped in the indwelling beat.i.tude of conscious grandeur.

Music hath charms to smooth the savage breast. The reason why I can not tell. In truth, strange to say, there are many other mysteries connected with our mental operations and inspirational impulses which are equally insoluble. The processes and boundaries of emotion in the soul of a Wyoming senator, when her back hair comes down in the midst of an eloquent peroration, are inscrutable and unfathomable. The bill for an act ent.i.tled an act to amend an act is likely then to lose its place on the calendar. But as a rule, the processes and boundaries of thought are immutably conditional. Its formulas were petrified in Aristotle, for man, with all his amazing progress in science and inventions, still abides a little lower than the angels, his goods never quite up to sample. The intellect pauses at a distance from ultimate truth, dimly gleaming through the hush of a large gloom, and painfully cries for external help.

Explosions often result from suddenly injecting thought into a vacant mind. Some syllogisms are fallacious as a decoy watermelon stuffed with paris green. The imagination may roam uncurbed through infinite realms, but reason is horizoned by an adjacent pale over which it can neither leap nor soar. Beyond this boundary philosophy can not direct man's tottering steps; further his unblazed path will lead into the vagaries and discords and peopled torments of lunacy, unless he permits faith to begin where reason ends. When a venerable pundit, formulating huge installments of lexicography, a.s.sures you that he knows it all, be careful where you repeat the statement. Tell it not in Gath; tell it to the marines--but break it gently, cautiously, or by the beard of the prophet you will find small credence.

Necessary as it has been, dominant as it has been, military talent is, after all, one of the lower forms of genius. It is not conversant with the highest or the richest intellectual pursuits. It may exist to perfection deficient in profound and liberal thinking, in imagination and taste, in the n.o.blest energies and inspirations of life.

Hugo says that at Waterloo each square was a volcano attacked by a thunder-cloud; the lava fought with the lightning. Their employment demands none of the finer fibers of intellect or loftier aspirations of the soul. Even the "business" statesman of well recognized shrewdness and well advertised piety, entrusted with cabinet portfolios on the theory that public office is a private usufruct, is likely to tread the higher realms of intelligence with more certain footsteps than the Wellingtons or Jubal Earlys of bellicose notability. And Susan B. Anthony insists to this day that the little affair between her younger brother Mark Antony and Cleopatra has been grossly exaggerated for base political purposes.

Parade differs from review as camp differs from campaign. The one is solemnity, the other is vivacity. Positive parade, comparative review, superlative battle, are the three degrees of comparison in war's activities. They are respectively tableau, melodrama and tragedy of systematic warfare. As ivory must germinate in the elephant's trunk before poker chips can materialize, so parade and review must antedate the battle agony.

Parade discloses the proficiency of a command in decorum, alignment and manual of arms. Review and inspection test its skill in evolution, as well as in equipment, accoutrement, care of weapons and general efficiency. Battle brings out all the qualities which drills, parades, reviews and inspections have developed or exhibited. During parades and reviews the officers come to the front; in battle they go to the rear. This accounts for the seeming mystery that so many still survive to tell the tale, and to tell it in such bewildering variety.

Daily Dress Parade being enjoined explicitly by regulations, becomes per force a vested right of citizen observers, and the periodic irritant of lethargic soldiery. But its first dainty freshness, before a state of lethargy has supervened and suppurated, threatens the maddening frenzy that drowns all sorrow in ginger ale. Its occurrence then brings whimsical complications equal to that of sweetening a whisky ring with a sugar trust; mad alternations of hope, elation, trepidation and horror; a synthesis like few!

That two and two make five is a mathematical preposterosity; that early experiments in Dress Parade should be a success is a military ditto, with extra emphasis on the antepenultimate. Let the heathen rage and the plutocrats imagine a vain thing! Here is a seriousness of facetiousness that would discourage a comedy star in full apogee.

As the fateful hour draws near, dim premonitions of coming divertis.e.m.e.nts rapidly multiply. Dress Parade is about to materialize, and the air is electric with expectancy, as when Corbett recognizes the belligerence of Persimmons, hires a typewriter, and opens hostilities in due form. Indications of the advent of an event worthy the delicate touch of Bjornstene Bjeminison's poetic fancy, are discerned. Matrons and maidens cl.u.s.ter and flutter and twitter athwart the designated color line. The matrons are superb, and the maidens are about to become historic--they are the girls who are to get left behind.

Accompanying them are their attendant male civilians, disgruntled as an oldest son who has ceased to be the only child by a large majority.

They feel like a bunch of shop-worn lower-case ciphers just ready to be edited into the h.e.l.l-box. They are keenly self-conscious of total eclipse in this martial splendor's plethoric incandescence. The rippling tee-hee of maidenly merriment rasps roughly on their ears, provoking wrath in the collar. Their cheerfulness matches that of a quarter of beef on its journey from dissecting table to chill-room.

Along company streets, redolent with intoxicating fumes of bean soup and loyalty up to date, manifest signs of preparation obtrude.

According to the accepted congressional code, nothing succeeds like success, when one is successful in succeeding himself. Even the demagogues, who love the people in stump speeches at ten dollars per speech, sometimes achieve success of that kind.

A genuine military success requires painstaking method, as these premonitions indicate. There are glimpses of toilet, glimmers of gun barrel, suggestions of ablution, flashes of bayonet. There are dashes of shoe-polishing and hair-brushery--mad wrestle with a Paderewski growth of foliage, here and there. A tent fly lifts and the process of creating a contemptuous curl of mustache greets the penetrating vision. Bright steel rammers gleam in the glare of the giddy avenue.

Advance individuals, nervously premature in completed canonicals, appear; then squads, groups, platoons--entire companies. Other things may be late and worms may chew them, but the scythe and hour-gla.s.s are always on time. So is Dress Parade.

Companies are aligned and files are counted off. Sergeants, surcharged with a rude, luminous unshaken faith in the republic, tumble stumblingly into their positions. Corporals, sensitive as the bulb of nerve fiber at the end of a cat's whisker, are given the merry hand with a marble heart.

The captain, already disliked by the enemies he has made, flings himself to the perilous front. Ranks are right faced and levant longitudinally, at a modified gallopade, toward the aforementioned color line. Here, after miscellaneous entanglements, unequaled since cable and trolley emanc.i.p.ated the mule from tram car servitude, a measurable coherence is secured. The companies form by some sort of incomprehensible intuition of incidence, on four or five alleged "guides." These stand with inverted muskets and quaking knees, a soft spot in the head and a hot spot in the cheek, robust delineations of despairing imbecility. Their terrors are tremendous, reminding one of that sweetly solemn village hour, when curfew rings and small boys hunt their haunts.

The colonel is now suddenly disclosed. He has dropped, unseen, presumably from the propitious heavens, into his allotted station, some forty paces in front of the center. At any rate, he is there. And if I had a hundred dollars--as I had once, though I may never look upon its like again--I would wager it all that he wishes he were somewhere (anywhere) else.

He is one of those lingering men whose minds go off with a wet fuse.

Like one dazed, he gazes amazed; and a gaze at him is worth the whole cost of admission. He wears a little bunch of whiskers on his chin, and his nose has the rising inflection. His warlike air and att.i.tude are prophecies of the day when Greece shall give Turkey a basting. He poses statuesque, with folded arms, head aslant, one hip elevated and both legs trembling. His make-up rivals that of a special Chinese envoy with the yellowest of jackets and peac.o.c.kiest of tails. He carries a frown over the bridge of his nose that portends deep concealment of valuable information as to his own consequence, unknown to the world at large. That frown, however, is only borrowed for the occasion; at heart he is humble as the Chicago aristocrat who has squandered the price of a car of pork in the purchase of a bogus Venus. He poses, with arms folded _a la_ Bonaparte over his Napoleonic stomach. He poses like the last erect relic of a forest, colossal, leafless, lifeless and sublime. He looks proud as the weary mechanic greeted on his front porch at eve by a shining galaxy of posterity. He has a right to be proud; he is the colonel. Bring forth the royal diadem and make him a present of it.

Meanwhile the adjutant is not idle. Far otherwise. His duties are complicated as the new quadruplex telegraphic system for the transmission of string-fiend fakes. He imitates the gyrations of a cyclone funnel in his delirious attempts to frame one geometric tangent out of ten miscellaneous arcs, with una.s.similable _radii_. His processes resemble a lurid, revolving nightmare of St. Valentine's day in the morning. He foams and fumes; he shouts and signals; he gesticulates; he genuflects; he perambulates. He pleads for correct formation as pallid Maryland corn fields plead for rain and fertilizers. His voice is softened by the sweet, feathery fluff on his upper lip, but it reaches far. His perplexities equal those of the man who went down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell among hotel runners. But as in the cruel abattoir the fated bullock glances at the sticker's cold, callous, calculating eye and bows to the inevitable, so the willing, though awkward, soldiery yield at last to the adjutant's persistent insistence. He finally establishes a distant resemblance to the shortest s.p.a.ce between two given markers. The markers introvert their marks and fall into desuetude--and the mummery is duly inaugurated.

First the music must sound off. It is of the cla.s.s that has functional relations with insomnia. Sad was the unlucky Kansas farmer who lost his wife and his best yoke of steers, all in the same week. Sad is the beatified spirit of the deceased alderman when he finds that the streets of heaven are already paved and there can be no rake-off. Sad is the fond wife, rummaging her husband's pockets, when she discovers through her tears that the coins are copper. But sadder than any, saddest of all, are they who by direful fortune are condemned to the slow torture of listening to a moulting military band. Yet it is an inescapable adjunct of Dress Parade.

Now the rear rank must "open order," a strategic maneuver performed with a ludicroterrific multiplication of blunders, appalling to the articles of war and fatal to the flintiest risibles. Each witness wears the face of one who drinketh vinegar unawares. More calisthenics by the adjutant. More heaving of anchors and straining at cables and hoisting on beam ends along the phalanx line. For the jolly mariners of the prairie, fresh from the delights of home, with its pealing bells and magic spells and appetizing smells, are trying to box the compa.s.s of spectacular punctilio, with odds dead against them in generous installments. Their timidity gives one a pain; their temerity makes one tender to the touch of sarcasm. Marvel not that our infant industries require protection while they are teething.

Then follow, in startling, swift succession, certain decisive events, decisive as the mystic, matrimonial rite which makes two mortals immortal.

The adjutant faces toward the left flank, shoulders his tinseled pinking iron, and sets his teeth firmly, almost defiantly.

He starts forward in an energetic amble, a melancholy glitter weltering in his optic, and his features bathed in gloom whose darkness might be bottled up and sold for Tyrian dye.

He trots trippingly down to the axis of oscillation; wheels suddenly to the right; charges madly on the perplexed, expectant colonel standing promiscuous as aforesaid; thinks better of it halfway, and halts suddenly.

He whirls entirely around at imminent risk of summersaulting.

He explodes vociferously: "Shltr-r-r Hr-r-rms! Pr-r-rsnt Hr-r-rms!"

That is all, but that is enough. The result is astonishing as the Rhode Island tenderfoot's first experiment with Montana wrath; but on the whole it is satisfactory. This is a free country, even when poverty stands with one ear at the telephone waiting for the stately steppings of an advance agent of prosperity. This is a free country, where the Italian may drink wine if he likes, even though the Norwegian may prefer alcohol. This is a free country, where, in the bright lexicon of sage brush statesmanship, there is no such word as surrender. This is a free country, where once in four years the voters may, if they see fit, commit all their political Jonahs to a school of whales with broad throats and stout stomachs. This is a free country, all the way from sterile Vermont to California, land of rose-bloom and gold dust, where striped candy ripens every month on the woodbine and new oranges can be dug before Easter. This is a free country, and each soldier on his own terms, in his own good time, obeys the adjutant's command. In the aggregate, every movement in the manual of arms, and many more, are attempted; in the ultimate, the entire battalion gets there.

But the methods and fashions in which nine hundred fire-arms are supposit.i.tiously tendered to all whom it may concern, are of bewildering midway plaisance variety. They are void of monotony, like a symposium on the cause and cure of panics. The absolute negation of simultaneousness is an abiding charm. Variety is spice; better thirty days of Texas than a palace in Cathay. When St. Louis contributes melted snow of a very dark color to swell old Mississippi's limpid tide, a waiting delta down in the gulf reaps the predestinated benefit.

The adjutant, reckless of addled brain tissue, wrenched spinal marrow and sprained leg-ligaments, whirls once more. His heels come down with a recoil that would jar the rivets from an iron-clad. Patience! n.o.ble adjutant (and gentle reader), the prancings and rotatings approach a terminal. We near a period such as that when the last cork has been popped at a wine supper and the bill must be settled. Grudge not the details that gild the gliding moments as they go. He whirls, and, with smart salute of naked saber pointed toward the deathless stars, confronts his commander. It is a moment big with fate. We are reminded of the memorable occasion when Cleopatra clasped the asp and perished dramatically.

The adjutant confronts the colonel and salutes him to the best of his feeble ability. Poor human utterance is inadequate at such an hour, but he manages to stammer in propitiatory tone: "Sir! the parade is formed!" Then, circling softly to right and rear of the rising splendor, he subsides, succ.u.mbs, and is henceforth lack-l.u.s.trous in this spangled pageantry. His part has been performed, and, whisper it gently to the sighing zephyrs, his future function is merely to stand at attention, like patience on a pedestal, grinning at grief.

For a moment or more the silence is painfully intense. You can hear hearts beat like the ticking of French clocks made in Rotterdam by a Swede. In the recesses of each chest, "boots and saddles" is sounded at frequent intervals. But outward silence reigns, as when a young woman, purple with throbbing timidity and expectant bashfulness, stands before her lover, uncertain whether he will lisp his love, or switch off to a side track and discuss the January thaw. Silence is golden and toothsome and restful. But it can not last forever. It breaks.

It breaks like a monetary stringency tapped with clearing-house certificates. The colonel now looms, the crowning pride of all this display. Behold, ye gathered mult.i.tude of non-combatives. Behold and tremble! His sword of sharpness, gift from admiring neighbors over at Goslin's lane, unsheathed after valorous struggles, swings clumsily to a perpendicular. Excalibur's fit prototype, as emblem of authority and fruitful of coming slaughters, is revealed. Hear, oh! post-office, and give ear, all ye blacksmith shops. Great Mars, his son, has sway. Mock him not! Madness that way lies, or worse. Cheer and the crowd cheers with you; laugh and you laugh in the guard-house. Such being the case, n.o.body cares to laugh. Napoleon called attention to the fact that forty centuries were perched on the pyramids to umpire one of his fights. More centuries than that are here to see and note.

And the colonel proceeds to make a few remarks. He is in a remarkful mood, but his style is dry and sententious. He is not one of those authors who swell the bowels of their books with empty wind. His remarks are meaningful. At home he was chief in the rosebud garden of oratory, but it is not his cue, on the present occasion, to get into a wrestling match with reckless word-trippers. He does all the talking himself. Spherical, sonorous vocables, the well-conned phrases of command, roll out upon the quivering air, and smite the mult.i.tudinous ear of this battalion with a startling sense of impotency. The mult.i.tudinous arm reaches out in nervous effort at obedience. But on divergent lines the effort doth its energy expend, and the results are simply marvelous. Melodramatic entanglements and perplexities tread on each other's heels, like candidates for patrimony at the obsequies of a plutocrat. Errors grotesque as hippogriffs impinge on errors plaintive as threnodies in minor E.

A woman of the impressionist school, who cooks in a chafing dish, and prescribes reform ball costumes of high-neck gown, long sleeves and mittens, is very appropriately registered from Boston. A school girl in the same city wrote in her composition: "The boy thinks himself smart because he can wade where it is deep, but G.o.d made the dry land for every living thing, and rested on the seventh day." No calligraph below the regulation Boston standard will suffice fully to portray the errors and horrors of this Dress Parade.

The evolutions of Darwinism are therefore presumably to be intelligently apprehended only by the Boston transcendentalist, nourished on mackerel salted to the _n_th power, and wearing a baked bean in his vermiform appendix. The evolutions and involutions of a maiden effort at Dress Parade are incomprehensible as the ravings of a salaried jaw-smith in a labor strike, who has burst into a profuse state of prevarication as the rosy beer-froth mantles his sublime cheek. True wisdom is best exemplified by a turtle withdrawn into his casemate; even the overestimated he-goat is less occult and dignified.

The popular platform at Va.s.sar is a free coinage of ice cream, 16 to 1, and a currency based on unsecured bonds of wedlock that have defaulted their dividends would be unanimously spurned. On the western frontier a presentable university can be set up with one bottle of sulphuric acid, a four-foot telescope and two ball bats. In some portions of the south a professor who boasts a bicycle kyphosis, writes polysyllabic profundities in long-waisted chirography, and combs his hair like John C. Calhoun, is impregnably intrenched.

Thus do educational standards pulsate and palpitate in different sections of our beloved country. In China, where the gra.s.shopper is a burden and mice are legal tender, it is not so. The tests for a civil service examination of candidates for concubine to the emperor are alike in all the provinces. The Chicago board of trade operator, who rises with the lark at 8:45 A. M., and five drinks later is ready for business, scorns the effeminate chappie who had his dog's tongue split in order to crease his pants. But in Chicago, where even the G.o.ddess of Liberty frequently requires a chaperone after dark, such things will happen in spite of the most stringent police regulations. Besides which they are mostly incompetent, irrelevant and immaterial. These evolutions and involutions of Dress Parade are to be wrought out by an incipient soldiery, which three months hence will be seeking the hen and ham of glory at the red mouth of smoke house and chicken coop, lucky also not to be subject to rigid inspection by a state entomologist. Now they are intangible as the man in the moon, ineffable as the man in the honeymoon.

Evolutions sometimes go backward. On the present occasion there is no restriction--everything goes, as the young woman said when he drifted slowly out of her life on a lumber raft. The evolutions are meritorious in design and multifarious in execution; likewise in the manual of arms. The flabergasted novices stand inextricable, like some brittle Rosamond tangled in silken skeins to the queen's taste. You may bray a crank in the mortar, but his wheels will still whirl. When the irreclaimable faddist bestrides his foible, give him due lat.i.tude.

When the ambient air is full of ozone and things of that sort, look out for thunder-storms.