A PEEP AT CAMP LYON AND THE TWO HUNDREDTH REGIMENT--DISCIPLINE AND THE
DICE-BOX--HOW SEVEN HUNDRED MEN CAN BE SQUEEZED INTO THREE.
"I am going to West Falls again in a few days--that is, if we do not get
orders for Washington," Colonel Egbert Crawford said, speaking to his
cousin, a few chapters back, as may be remembered. By which he meant, of
course, if he meant anything, that the Two Hundredth Regiment, with the
raising of which he had been charged by Major-General Governor Morgan,
was in a high state of discipline as well as fully up to the maximum in
numbers, and burning to go down to the field of carnage and revenge the
deaths of those foully slaughtered by rebel hands.
It may be interesting to know exactly what _was_ the condition of the
Two Hundredth Regiment, at that exact time--how many it numbered--what
was its proficiency in drill--what was the appearance of the camp at
which it was quartered--and how laboriously Colonel Crawford was engaged
in bringing it up to the highest standard of perfection for citizen
soldiery. For this purpose, it will be well to look in at the
encampment, with the eyes of some persons from the city who visited it
on Sunday the 29th of June--the very day on which McClellan, from sheer
lack of troops, abandoned the White House, necessarily destroying so
much valuable property, losing for the time the last hope of the capture
of Richmond, and falling back on the line of the James River.
The Two Hundredth Regiment lay at "Camp Lyon," (as it may be designated
for the purposes of this chronicle)--a locality on Long Island, a few
miles eastward from the City Hall of Brooklyn, and easily accessible by
one of the lines of horse-cars running from Fulton Ferry. It had been
some two months established; recruiting for the regiment was said to be
going on very rapidly; "only a few more men wanted" was the burden of
the song sung in the advertising columns of the morning papers; rations
for some seven hundred men were continually furnished for it, by the
Quartermaster's Department; the Colonel made flattering reports of it
every day or two, to the higher military authorities in the city, and at
least once a week to the still higher authorities at Albany; and a
political Brigadier-General was reported to have gone down and reviewed
it, once or twice, coming back eminently satisfied with its numbers,
discipline and performances.
The visitors from the city, who, having no other connection whatever
with the progress of this story, may be fobbed off with the very
ordinary names of Smith and Brown,--reached the camp at about four
o'clock on that Sunday afternoon, having waited until that late hour in
the day for the purpose of avoiding the noon-tide heat, and being
anxious to be present at the evening drill, which was supposed to take
place in the neighborhood of six o'clock. An acquaintance of theirs, an
officer in the Two Hundredth, one Lieutenant Woodruff, had several times
invited them to "run down to camp and see him before he went away,"
promising to do the honors of the encampment in the best manner
compatible with the duties of a "fellow busy all the time, you know."
Alighting from the vehicle, Smith and Brown found the camp stretching
before them, scarcely so picturesque as they had anticipated, but with
enough of the military air about its green sod and conical tents, to
make it rather varied and pleasing to a couple of "cits" who had not
looked upon the extended army pageant around Washington, or seen
anything more of war than could be observed in a turn-out of the First
Division on the Fourth of July. On a broad level, stretching back for a
quarter of a mile from the railroad-track, and terminating in a strip of
noble oak woods, the tents of the encampment were pitched, forty or
fifty in number, not too white and cleanly-looking, even at a distance,
and decidedly dingy and yellow when brought to a nearer view. Some
attempt had been made at forming them into lines, with regular alleys
between; the hospital-tent at some distance in the rear, distinguished
by a yellow flag hanging listlessly from a pole in front; and the
Colonel's large round tent or marquee prominent in the centre, a small
American flag before it, doing its best to wave in the slight sea air
that came in over the Long Island hills. Groups of soldiers, variously
disposed, dotted the space between the tents or sat at the doors,
chatting with male or female civilians, or their own wives and
daughters, who had run down to see them as an amusement for Sunday
afternoon; while sentinels paced backward and forward along certain
lines and offered an uncertain amount of inconvenience to those who
wished to traverse the camp-grounds in one direction or another.
Smith and Brown, looking for Woodruff and finding it a matter of some
difficulty to discover him, paced up and down among the tents, wherever
the sentinels permitted, looking in at the doors of those canvas
cottages and observing the humors which denoted that the occupants had
been the possessors of plenty of time for other purposes than drill,
however proficient they might have become in that military necessity.
Scarcely one of the alleys between the rows of tents but had its
street-name, stuck up on a piece of chalked or charcoaled board at the
entrance--from the ambitious "Broadway" to the aristocratic "Fifth
Avenue" and the doubtful "Mercer Street." Many of the tents bore equally
significant inscription, from the "City Hall" (where some scion of an
alderman probably made his warlike abode), to the "Astor House" and "St.
Nicholas" (where perhaps some depreciated son of snobbery was known to
have his quarters), and the "Hotel de Coffee and Cakes," suggestive of
inmates from the less pretentious precincts of the city. Within the
tents, as Smith and Brown took the liberty of looking in, a variety of
spectacles were discovered. Straw seemed to be an almost universal
commodity--quite as indispensable there as in pigpens or railroad-cars;
and next to straw, perhaps battered trunks and very cheap pine tables
predominated. Greasy kettles and dishes could be discovered just under
the flap of the tent, in many instances; and here and there a tent would
be passed, emitting odors of rancid grease, stale tobacco and personal
foulness, not at all appetizing to visitors unfamiliar with the gutters
of Mackerelville or the hold of a ship in the horse-latitudes.
In some of the tents the men were asleep on the tables, in others on the
trunks, in still others on the straw. In a few Smith and Brown saw
soldiers drinking; in others, in positions suggestive of being very
drunk, had they found them elsewhere than in a well-regulated camp; in
still others playing cards for pennies, furtively behind the flaps of
the tent or openly in the vicinity of the door. They caught fragments of
broad oaths from a few, and snatches of obscene stories from a few
others; and taken altogether, the impression of the Two Hundredth being
in a high state of discipline or a very excellent sanitary condition,
was not strongly forced upon their minds. This impression was not
strengthened, when, being directed by one of the sentries to the
hospital-tent as a place where they might be likely at that moment to
find Lieutenant Woodruff,--they failed to discover him there, but did
not fail to discover one corporal keeping guard in that sanitary
domicil, so drunk that he was asleep and so drunkenly abusive when they
woke him that they were glad to permit him to fall back again into his
beastly slumber.
At length they found Lieutenant Woodruff, who had just returned from
escorting another party of friends to the cars, on their way back to
town. He seemed glad to see them, though not enthusiastic in his
demonstrations--invited them to the tent in which he messed with some
brother officers--and they took that direction for a rest after their
hot promenade.
Somewhat to the apparent mortification of Woodruff, when they reached
the tent none of the brother officers to whom he had promised to
introduce his friends, were to be found; but they had left their traces
behind them. Two or three empty bottles and as many uncleaned glasses
lay about the table, and the remains of spilt liquor wetted and stained
the boards of the seats, while a very dirty pack of cards, half on the
table and the remainder on the ground, showed that the officers were not
only a little unscrupulous as to the character of their Sunday
amusements, but equally indifferent as to the cleanliness of the tools
with which they performed the arduous labors of old-sledge, euchre and
division-loo. Woodruff cleared away the debris from the table, and flung
it into one corner with some petulance which did not escape the notice
of his visitors. Finally part of a box of bad cigars was introduced, and
among the fumes engendered by those indispensable "weeds," a little
conversation followed.
"Well, when do you get off?" asked Smith, who had been very anxious to
come on that Sunday, instead of waiting for the next, under the
impression that the regiment might move at any time and thus deprive
them of the visit. He had been led to suppose so, partially from
conversations with Woodruff in the city, and partially by the statements
in the newspapers, before alluded to, made with reference to this and
other "favorite regiments."
"Get off!" answered Woodruff, with no concealment of the vexation in his
tone. "Humph! well, I think we shall need to get on a little faster,
before we get off at all!"
"Not full yet, eh?" asked Brown.
"Not _exactly_," was the answer of the Lieutenant, with a satirical
emphasis on the second word which indicated that some other would have
been quite as well in place.
"Why, I thought you were!" said Smith. "The papers had you up to seven
hundred some time ago, and with all your big posters and advertisements
and the large bounties offered, you ought to be bringing them in very
rapidly."
"Yes, I suppose so!" answered Woodruff. "We _ought_ to do a good many
things in this world, that we do not find it convenient to do. We
_ought_ to have been full, and off to Washington, a month ago, and would
have been, if there had been any management."
"Why you speak as if you were discouraged and dissatisfied," said Brown,
"and not at all as you talked to us when in the city a few days ago."
"No, probably not," answered the Lieutenant. "Well, the fact is, boys,
that I have been lying to you like--(and here he used a very hard word
not necessary to be recorded.) We have _all_ been lying; but to you, at
least, I mean to make a clean breast of it. I did not suppose you would
come down, and while you kept at a distance I thought we might as well
keep up a good reputation. Now that you are here, you have not half an
eye if you do not know that 'Camp Lyon' is a humbug, and that there is
no discipline or anything else in it that _should_ be here. I am going
to get out of it, if I can with any honor."
"What is the matter?" asked Smith, very much disappointed, and very much
discouraged at the key which the situation of Camp Lyon seemed to offer
to the corresponding situation of many others of the crack recruiting
stations depended upon for filling up the reduced ranks of the army.
"What is the matter? Everything!" said Woodruff, fairly launched out in
an exposure of the abuses of the recruiting service, for which he had
not before had a fair and _safe_ opportunity. "Half the men are good for
nothing, and almost all the officers worse. We could get along with
worthless _men_, and perhaps make soldiers of them, if we only had
officers worth their salt. Field or line, there is not one in three that
knows when a 'shoulder-arms' is correctly made; and there is no more
attempt at either study or practice than there would be if we were a
hunting party encamped in the Northern woods. Commissions have been
issued to anybody supposed to possess some political influence; and
subordinate commissions have been promised by the higher officers to any
one who offered to bring in a certain number of rapscallions or pay down
a certain sum of money. Those who are not drunken, are lazy; and the men
know about as much of wholesome discipline as a hog knows of holy-water.
I have tried to do a little better with some of the squads of my own
company; but I think that complaints have been made that I 'overworked'
the men, and I have fallen into decidedly bad odor with the good people
up at the big house yonder."
"And who are _they_?" asked Brown, wofully ignorant of the details of
recruiting in 1862. "And what are they doing up at the 'big house,' as
you call it?"
"Eh? you haven't been in there, have you?" said Woodruff. "Come along
then, and see. Of course you know that I must refer to our gallant
Colonel and the other leading officers at the head of the regiment; and
of course you are not so green as not to know that the big house beyond
the railroad track, there, is a tavern. Come along and let us see what
Colonel Crawford and the rest of them happen to be doing; and by the
time that is over we shall have our 'evening parade,' which you must
certainly see before you go home."
Escorted by the Lieutenant, the two citizens took their way to the "big
house"--a hotel standing on the north side of the railroad track and
very near it--a wooden building of two stories, with a piazza in front
and at the east end, and flanked by a row of horse-sheds indicating that
there was some dependence made upon the patronage of fast drivers
stopping there on race days or when trotting was peculiarly good on the
pike or the plank. Before the house paced two sentries, with muskets at
the shoulder, though what they were guarding was not so clear, as every
one passed who wished to do so, whether in uniform or citizen's dress.
Behind the corner of the piazza, eastward, an officer was leaning back
in his chair against the clap-boards, with his hat over his eyes and
apparently asleep; and a few feet from him a sergeant, distinguishable
by three dingy stripes on his arm that should have been laid upon his
back, was toying, not too decently, with a woman whose looks and manners
both proclaimed her one of the "necessary evils" of a modern community.
"Do they allow such actions as that--right here in public, and in the
very presence of the officers?" asked Smith, whose education had
possibly been a little neglected in some other particulars, as Brown's
had been in the details of the military profession.
"Guess so!" was the significant reply of Woodruff. "Come up stairs!" and
the party passed on. As they did so, they looked through a door to the
left, and saw a bar of unplaned boards extending the whole length of a
spacious room, with half a dozen attendants behind it and as many beer
kegs and whiskey decanters pouring out their contents. Mingled with here
and there a civilian, the whole front of the bar was full of soldiers,
all apparently drinking, and drinking again, and drinking yet again,
nibbling cheese, crackers and smoked-beef meanwhile, apparently to keep
up the necessary thirst. "Fire and fall back!" seemed to be a military
axiom not always observed by the rank and file of the Two Hundredth, as
many of them kept their places and went on with their guzzling, with a
determination worthy of a much better cause. But it was occasionally
observed, after all, for there were a few who had been overcome by the
heat of the bibulatory conflict, and who had relapsed into partial
helplessness in chairs around the walls; and there were others who began
to stagger and talk thickly at the counter, growing obscure and maudlin
in their oaths, and shaking hands altogether too often, indicating the
sleepy stage as very soon to follow.
As the two friends and their conductor passed up-stairs, they noticed
two officers in somewhat loud conversation, not far from the landing and
near the door of a side-room, on the handle of the door of which one of
them held his hand a portion of the time. Without any effort, some of
the words of their conversation could easily be heard; and Smith and
Brown, who had no more than the average of that creditable delicacy
which hears nothing intended only for other ears, caught some words
which will bear setting down here as affording an additional clue to the
state of discipline.
"That," said Woodruff, giving Smith a nudge as they came to the head of
the stairs, speaking in a low tone, and pointing to the taller of the
two men, who stood with his side-face presented at the moment,--"that is
Colonel Crawford; and the other, the shorter man, is Captain Lowndes,
who has been recruiting for the regiment at the Park. If I was in better
odor with the Colonel, I would introduce you; but come on."
Smith and Jones did _not_ "come on" at the instant, and what they caught
from the two officers was the following:
"Not _one_ in a week?" asked the Colonel, in a tone mingling surprise
and anger. "Not one? D--n it!"
"I am sorry to say, not one," was the reply of Captain Lowndes. "They
nearly all sing the same tune, however."
"Well, it won't do for _us_, you know!" said the Colonel. "Another
review, and by some officer who was not a d--d lawyer blockhead, might
be awkward!" Colonel Crawford either forgot, at that moment, that he had
any connection with the legal profession, or he chose to ignore the
fact; and it is not to be supposed that his subordinate reminded him of
it. "We must have a paragraph in the to-morrow morning," he went on,
naming an influential daily, "giving the regiment another 'blow.' If it
does not get us any recruits, it will at least make the thing look
better at Albany. Hum--where's Dalton?"
"The Adjutant went to Boston yesterday," was the response of Lowndes.
"Said he had business, though as he had a girl with him when he stepped
on board the boat, I suspect his business was rather personal."
"D--n him!" muttered the Colonel, between his teeth. Then louder, to
Lowndes: "I thought I told you to request him, if you saw him, not to
leave the city again without permission from _me_! It seems you _have_
seen him; and why were my orders not obeyed?" The Colonel spoke now with
great dignity, and drew himself up so that the eagles on his
shoulder-straps were at least half an inch higher than when he was
squatted down into easy position.
"Your orders _were_ obeyed," answered the Captain. "I _did_ tell him."
"And what did he say?" asked the Colonel, lifting his eyebrows with some
appearance of interest.
"He said," replied the Captain, enunciating his words very clearly, as
if he had no objection to their producing their full weight on his
superior--"That Colonel Egbert Crawford might go to h-ll, and he would
go to Boston."
"Did he?--d--n him!" said the Colonel, who seemed to have a small bottle
of profanity lately uncorked, or one that he certainly was not in the
habit of uncorking in the presence of those on whom he wished to produce
a different impression.
"Yes he did," answered the Captain. "He said a little more. Perhaps you
would like to have _that_, while I am at it?"
"That?--yes, out with the whole of it!" spoke the Colonel, with another
oath which need not be recorded here as any additional seasoning.
"He took occasion to remark, where the lady who was with him could hear
it," Lowndes went on--"that he didn't care a d--n for you, and that you
dare not make a complaint against him at Albany, a bit more than you
dare jump into a place that is even hotter than the weather is here
to-day."
"Did he--the infernal hound!" broke out the Colonel, his dark brows
literally corrugated with rage. "I'll teach him whether I _dare_ or not,
before I am forty-eight hours older!" But either there _was_ something
behind the curtain, or Colonel Egbert Crawford was a man of most angelic
temper, for the moment after he broke out into a laugh that was not of
the most musical order and said: "Oh, well--Dalton is a pretty good
fellow, after all, and perhaps the next Adjutant would be a worse one
for the regiment."
With these words Colonel Egbert Crawford passed into the side room by
the door of which he had been standing, while Captain Lowndes touched
his hat to him very slightly and went on to the larger room towards
which the others were proceeding. As the Colonel swung back the door,
Smith caught a very quick glance within, and saw a table, with bottles,
a pack of cards, a couple of dice-boxes, and four or five persons
seated, lounging and smoking. The party appeared to him as if they
might have been interrupted in a little harmless Sunday afternoon
amusement, and as if they were only waiting for the return of the
Colonel to the room, to renew that amusement in a very pleasant and
effective manner. That impression was not removed by his hearing, after
he had passed through the open door into the other room, a suspicious
sound like the rattling of dice and another sound very like the chinking
of coin, proceeding from the smaller apartment.
Smith and Brown found very little in the officers' room, dignified by
the name of "regimental headquarters," demanding particular record.
There were two red pine tables set together and forming a counter,
behind which the regimental officers were supposed to be located; and on
the end of the tables nearest the front of the house was a small desk,
with pigeon-holes, at which, by the same fiction, the Adjutant was
supposed to be always sitting, performing the arduous duties of his
office. Supported by nails in the ceiling were two flag-staffs, their
butts shaped to fit the muzzles of short rifles, and from the upper end
of each depending one of the "guidons" of the regiment, gorgeously blue
in color and lettered in shaded gold--understood to be the gift of
certain ladies who properly appreciated the talents and devotion of the
officers and the hopeful prospects of the regiment under formation.
Behind the tables was a mantel; and on it stood two decanters partially
filled with liquor, a plate of crackers and another of cheese. A
Lieutenant was seated at the Adjutant's desk, engaged in filling up
blank leaves-of-absence for each in turn, of a disorderly crowd of
twenty or thirty soldiers who pressed forward from the door to receive
them. Two or three of this crowd presented former leaves, to have them
extended. One of these was refused, the Lieutenant laboring under some
sort of impression that a private who had been three weeks under
enlistment, and absent all that time on leave, would not become very
proficient in drill unless he spent at least one week at the encampment
before marching. The wronged man did not appear to take the refusal very
much to heart, however: he merely remarked to one of the others, loud
enough for the Lieutenant to have heard if he had been very observant,
that "he didn't care two cusses for the leave: he would go off when he
liked and stay as long as he liked, and he should like to see anybody
smart enough to stop him."
At the mantel, taking a quiet drink with half a dozen civilian friends
who had been admitted behind the tables, stood a tall, soldierly-looking
man, pointed out by Woodruff as Lieut. Colonel Burns. Unaccountably, he
wore no straps on the shoulder, his blue blouse looking as if it was
thrown on for use instead of show, and his whole demeanor that of a man
who, if opportunity should only be given him, would be a soldier. He had
his sword-belts at the waist, however, and also wore his sword, as if he
had some indefinite idea that something would thereby be gained in an
_appearance_ of efficiency for the regiment.
"Have you seen almost enough?" asked Lieutenant Woodruff, of the two
citizens.
"Quite enough!" said both in a breath.
"Well, time is just up," said the Lieutenant. "And in good time comes
the drum-beat for evening parade. Come along, and see what it is like. I
must leave you, but you can see the display without me."
A couple of snare-drums were rattling somewhere among the tents, and the
shrill notes of a light infantry bugle sounded. Lieut. Colonel Burns
buckled his sword belts a little tighter and straightened himself to a
soldierly bearing, as he left the room with his friends. A sergeant took
down the guidons, and all, except the one Lieutenant at the desk and two
or three soldiers who did not consider the call as of sufficient
consequence, followed them down to the parade-ground in front of the
camp. Col. Egbert Crawford seemed to be like the two or three soldiers
named, and not to consider the call of consequence enough to demand any
attention on his part; for he did not, at least during the stay of Smith
and Brown, emerge from the privacy of the inner room or make any
movement to superintend the "dress parade."
That "dress parade" completed the experience of Smith and Brown; and it
completed, at the same time, their knowledge of the numbers and
efficiency of the Two Hundredth Regiment that was "almost ready to
march." In squads of from ten to twenty-five, the soldiers gathered from
their slovenly tents, until the observers could count something more
than two hundred. Then by squads and afterwards in what was intended as
a "regimental formation," they went through a series of marchings,
countermarchings and facings, with about the proficiency which would be
shown by the same number of entirely raw recruits, and with the same
proportion of the most obvious blunderings that used to be exhibited by
the "slab-companies" at the "general trainings" or "general musters" in
the country sections, when a lamentable caricature upon military spirit
was kept up, in the years following the War of 1812.
Not a musket was to be seen in the hands of one of these men, except the
few sentries. They "had not been furnished," as the explanation was sure
to be given afterwards when the regiment was discovered to be an
undisciplined mob! They would probably not be "furnished" until just at
the moment when the regiment should be forced to move, and then they
would be put into hands liable to be called on to use them in battle
within a week--those hands knowing no more of the management of the
deadly instrument of modern warfare, than so many Sioux or South Sea
Islanders might have known of watch-making or extracting the cube-root.
And yet with these men, and in this manner, the armies of the republic
were being recruited; and on the deeds in arms wrought by these men,
possibly in the very first conflict into which they were rushed like
huddled sheep, the eyes of the military nations of Europe were to be
turned with anxious interest. They were to fight, too, against a race of
men to whom deadly weapons had been familiar from childhood, and who
would consequently make soldiers, to the full extent of their
capability, with one-half the training which was to these Northern men
an absolute necessity! Is it any wonder that we have occasionally met
with a Bull Run or a Second Field of Manassas, with this shameful waste
of our opportunities and our war-material?
Smith and Brown left "Camp Lyon," before the completion of the "dress
parade," with a him consciousness of being painfully disenchanted in a
very important particular.
"Do you know, Smith" said Brown, as they were rolling along in the car,
homeward--"that I doubt whether there are three hundred men in that
regiment, absentees and all--instead of seven hundred as the papers
report?"
"Humph," said Smith, "it seems to be all a humbug together! But I wonder
what becomes of the extra pay issued to seven hundred men, when there
are only three hundred entitled to receive it? And I wonder what becomes
of all the extra rations that are drawn for them every day? Somebody
must be making something out of it--eh? I wonder if there are any more
regiments in the same condition?"
"Probably!" said Brown. Whereupon the two citizens fell into a very deep
and silent train of thought, leaving us no additional speech to record.
Other people than Smith, at about that time, felt like propounding the
same queries as to the disposition of extra pay and rations. Some of
those queries, which _have_ been propounded, have not yet been answered.
When they are, if that happy period ever arrives, we may know something
more of the channels and sluices through which the wealth of the richest
nation on the globe has ebbed away, leaving such inconsiderable results
to show for the expenditure.
And yet Colonel Egbert Crawford, visiting the city two hours afterwards,
and dropping in at two or three favorite resorts of men who talked
horse, war and politics, on his way to the house of his cousin,--bore
himself bravely under his weight of uniform, and more than once threw in
a pardonable boast over the services he was rendering the country, the
sacrifices he was making, and the rapid growth and efficiency of the Two
Hundredth Regiment.
"All brass is not fashioned and moulded in foundries, where men do
swelter like to those standing in the flames of the fiery furnace," says
an old writer, Arnold of Thorndean, "but much of it doth become shaped
in the human countenance."