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FROM SCHOOL TO BATTLE-FIELD
[Illustration: "Come down aff the top o' dthat harrse!"]
FROM SCHOOL TO BATTLE-FIELD
A STORY OF THE WAR DAYS
BY CAPTAIN CHARLES KING, U.S.A. AUTHOR OF "TROOPER ROSS," ETC.
ILLUSTRATED BY VIOLET OAKLEY AND CHARLES H. STEPHENS
PHILADELPHIA J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY 1899
COPYRIGHT, 1898, BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY.
ILLUSTRATIONS
"COME DOWN AFF THE TOP O' DTHAT HARRSE!"
ALMOST SENSELESS, TILL SHORTY STROVE TO LIFT HIS BLEEDING HEAD UPON
HIS KNEE
"I COULDN'T STAND IT. I HAD TO GO"
SHE WAS PERMITTED TO READ AND TO WEEP OVER SNIPE'S PATHETIC LETTER
FIRST CAPTURE OF THE ADVANCING ARMS OF THE UNION
"WHERE'D YOU GET THAT WATCH?"
FROM SCHOOL TO BATTLE-FIELD.
CHAPTER I.
"If there's anything I hate more than a rainy Saturday, call me a
tadpole!" said the taller of two boys who, with their chins on their
arms and their arms on the top of the window-sash, were gazing gloomily
out over a dripping world. It was the second day of an east wind, and
every boy on Manhattan Island knows what an east wind brings to New York
City, or used to in days before the war, and this was one of them.
"And our nine could have lammed that Murray Hill crowd a dozen to
nothing!" moaned the shorter, with disgust in every tone. "Next Saturday
the 'Actives' have that ground, and there'll be no decent place to
play--unless we can trap them over to Hoboken. What shall we do,
anyhow?"
The taller boy, a curly-headed, dark-eyed fellow of sixteen, whose long
legs had led to his school name of Snipe, turned from the contemplation
of an endless vista of roofs, chimneys, skylights, clothes-lines, all
swimming in an atmosphere of mist, smoke, and rain, and glanced back at
the book-laden table.
"There's that Virgil," he began, tentatively.
"Oh, Virgil be blowed!" broke in the other on the instant. "It's bad
enough to have to work week-days. I mean what can we do for--fun?" and
the blue eyes of the youngster looked up into the brown of his taller
chum.
"That's all very well for you, Shorty," said Snipe. "Latin comes easy to
you, but it don't to me. You've got a sure thing on exam., I haven't,
and the pater's been rowing me every week over those blasted reports."
"Well-l, I'm as bad off in algebra or Greek, for that matter. 'Pop' told
me last week I ought to be ashamed of myself," was the junior's answer.
And, lest it be supposed that by "Pop" he referred to the author of his
being, and thereby deserves the disapproval of every right-minded reader
at the start, let it be explained here and now that "Pop" was the
head--the "rector"--of a school famous in the ante-bellum days of
Gotham; famous indeed as was its famous head, and though they called him
nicknames, the boys worshipped him. Older boys, passed on into the cap
and gown of Columbia (items of scholastic attire sported only, however,
at examinations and the semi-annual speech-making), referred to the
revered professor of the Greek language and literature as "Bull," and
were no less fond of him, nor did they hold him less in reverence. Where
are they now, I wonder?--those numerous works bound in calf, embellished
on the back with red leather bands on which were stamped in gold ----'s
Virgil, ----'s Horace, ----'s Sallust, ----'s Homer? Book after book had
he, grammars of both tongues, prosodies likewise, Roman and Greek
antiquities, to say nothing of the huge classical dictionary. One could
cover a long shelf in one's student library without drawing upon the
works of any other authority, and here in this dark little room, on the
topmost floor of a brownstone house in Fourteenth Street, a school-boy
table was laden at its back with at least eight of Pop's ponderous tomes
to the exclusion of other classics.
But on the shelf above were books by no means so scholarly and far more
worn. There they stood in goodly array, Mayne Reid's "Boy Hunters,"
"Scalp Hunters," "The Desert Home," "The White Chief," flanked by a
dusty "Sanford and Merton" that appeared to hold aloof from its
associates. There, dingy with wear though far newer, was Thomas Hughes's
inimitable "Tom Brown's School-Days at Rugby." There was what was then
his latest, "The Scouring of the White Horse," which, somehow, retained
the freshness of the shop. There were a few volumes of Dickens, and
Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales. There on the wall were some vivid battle
pictures, cut from the _London Illustrated News_,--the Scots Grays in
the melee with the Russian cavalry at Balaklava; the Guards, in their
tall bearskins and spike-tail coats, breasting the slopes of the Alma.
There hung a battered set of boxing-gloves, and on the hooks above them
a little brown rifle, muzzle-loading, of course. The white-covered bed
stood against the wall on the east side of the twelve-by-eight
apartment, its head to the north. At its foot were some objects at which
school-boys of to-day would stare in wonderment; a pair of heavy boots
stood on the floor, with a pair of trousers so adjusted to them that, in
putting on the boots, one was already half-way into the trousers, and
had only to pull them up and tightly belt them at the waist. On the post
hung a red flannel shirt, with a black silk neckerchief sewed to the
back of the broad rolling collar. On top of the post was the most
curious object of all,--a ribbed helmet of glistening black leather,
with a broad curving brim that opened out like a shovel at the back,
while a stiff, heavy eagle's neck and head, projecting from the top,
curved over them and held in its beak an emblazoned front of black
patent leather that displayed in big figures of white the number 40, and
in smaller letters, arching over the figures, the name, Lady Washington.
It was the fire-cap of a famous engine company of the old New York
volunteer department,--a curious thing, indeed, to be found in a
school-boy's room.
The desk, littered with its books and papers, stood in the corner
between the window and the east wall. Along the west wall was a
curtained clothes-press. Then came the marble-topped washstand, into
which the water would flow only at night, when the demand for Gotham's
supply of Croton measurably subsided. Beyond that was the door leading
to the open passage toward the stairway to the lower floors. In the
corner of the room were the school-boy paraphernalia of the day,--a
cricket bat, very much battered, two base-ball bats that the boys of
this generation would doubtless scan suspiciously, "heft" cautiously,
then discard disdainfully, for they were of light willow and bigger at
the bulge by full an inch than the present regulation. Beneath them in
the corner lay the ball of the year 1860, very like the article now in
use, but then referred to as a "ten shilling," and invariably made at an
old shoe-shop at the foot of Second Avenue, whose owner, a veteran
cobbler, had wisely quit half-soling and heeling for a sixpence and was
coining dollars at the newly discovered trade. All the leading clubs
were then his patrons,--the Atlantics, the Eckfords, the Mutuals, the
Stars, even the Unions of Morrisania. All the leading junior clubs swore
by him and would use no ball but his,--the champion Actives, the Alerts,
the Uncas. (A "shanghai club" the boys declared the last named to be
when it first appeared at Hamilton Square in its natty uniform of
snow-white flannel shirts and sky-blue trousers.) Base ball was in its
infancy, perhaps, but what a lusty infant and how pervading! Beyond that
corner and hanging midway on the northward wall was a portentous object,
an old-fashioned maple shell snare-drum, with white buff leather sling
and two pairs of ebony sticks, their polished heads and handles
proclaiming constant use, and the marble surface of the washstand top,
both sides, gave proof that when practice on the sheepskin batter head
was tabooed by the household and the neighborhood, the inoffensive stone
received the storm of "drags," and "flams," and "rolls." Lifting the
curtain that overhung the boyish outfit of clothing, there stood
revealed still further evidence of the martial tastes of the occupant,
for the first items in sight were a natty scarlet shell-jacket, a pair
of trim blue trousers, with broad stripe of buff, and a jaunty little
forage-cap, with regimental wreath and number. Underneath the curtain,
but readily hauled into view, were found screwed and bolted to heavy
blocks of wood two strange-looking miniature cannon, made, as one could
soon determine, by sawing off a brace of old-fashioned army muskets
about a foot from the breech. Two powder-flasks and a shot-bag hung on
pegs at the side of the curtained clothes-press. A little mirror was
clamped to the wall above the washstand. Some old fencing foils and a
weather-beaten umbrella stood against the desk. An open paint-box, much
besmeared, lay among the books. Some other pamphlets and magazines were
stacked up on the top of the clothes-press. Two or three colored prints,
one of Columbian Engine, No. 14, a very handsome Philadelphia
"double-decker." Another of Ringgold Hose, No. 7, a really beautiful
four-wheeler of the old, old type, with chocolate-colored running gear
and a dazzling plate-glass reel, completed the ornamentation of this
school-boy den. There was no room for a lounge,--there was room only for
two chairs; but that diminutive apartment was one of the most popular
places of resort Pop's boys seemed to know, and thereby it became the
hot-bed of more mischief, the birthplace of more side-splitting school
pranks than even the staid denizens of that most respectable brownstone
front ever dreamed of, whatever may have been the convictions of the
neighborhood, for Pop's boys, be it known, had no dormitory or
school-house in common. No such luck! They lived all over Manhattan
Island, all over Kings, Queens, and Westchester counties. They came from
the wilds of Hoboken and the heights of Bergen. They dwelt in massive
brownstone fronts on Fifth Avenue and in modest wooden, one-story
cottages at Fort Washington. They wore "swell" garments in some cases
and shabby in others. They were sons of statesmen, capitalists, lawyers,
doctors, and small shopkeepers. They were rich and they were poor; they
were high and they were low, tall and short, skinny and stout, but they
were all pitched, neck and crop, into Pop's hopper, treated share and
share alike, and ground and polished and prodded or praised, and a more
stand-on-your-own-bottom lot of young vessels ("vessels of wrath," said
the congregation of a neighboring tabernacle) never had poured into them
impartially the treasures of the spring of knowledge. They were of four
classes, known as the first, second, third, and fourth Latin,
corresponding to the four classes of Columbia and other colleges, and to
be a first Latin boy at Pop's was second only to being a senior at Yale
or Columbia. As a rule the youngsters "started fair" together at the
bottom, and knew each other to the backbone by the time they reached the
top. Few new boys came in except each September with the fourth Latin.
Pop had his own way of teaching, and the boy that didn't know his
methods and had not mastered his "copious notes" might know anybody
else's Caesar, Sallust, or Cicero by rote, but he couldn't know Latin.
Pop had a pronunciation of the Roman tongue that only a Pop's bred boy
could thoroughly appreciate. Lads who came, as come in some rare cases
they did, from Eton or Harrow, from the Latin schools of Boston or the
manifold academies of the East, read as they had been taught to read,
and were rewarded with a fine sarcasm and the information that they had
much to unlearn. Pop's school was encompassed roundabout by many another
school, whose pupils took their airing under ushers' eyes, to the
howling disdain of Pop's unhampered pupils, who lined the opposite curb
and dealt loudly in satirical comment. There was war to the knife
between Pop's boys and Charlier's around the corner, to the end that the
hours of recess had to be changed or both schools, said the police,
would be forbidden the use of Madison Square. They had many faults, had
Pop's boys, though not all the neighborhood ascribed to them, and they
had at least one virtue,--they pulled well together. By the time it got
to the top of the school each class was like a band of brothers, and
never was there a class of which this could be more confidently asserted
than the array of some twenty-seven youngsters, of whom Snipe and his
smaller chum, Shorty, were prominent members, in the year of our Lord
eighteen hundred and sixty.
Yet, they had their black sheep, as is to be told, and their
scapegraces, as will not need to be told, and months of the oddest,
maddest, merriest school life in the midst of the most vivid excitement
the great city ever knew, and on the two lads wailing there at the attic
window because their fates had balked the longed-for game at Hamilton
Square, there were dawning days that, rain or shine, would call them
shelterless into constant active, hazardous life, and that, in one at
least, would try and prove and temper a brave, impatient spirit,--that
should be indeed the very turning-point of his career.
Patter, patter, patter! drip, drip, drip! the rain came pelting in
steady shower. The gusty wind blew the chimney smoke down into the
hollow of the long quadrilateral of red brick house backs. Three, four,
and five stories high, they hemmed in, without a break, a "plant" of
rectangular back-yards, each with its flag-stone walk, each with its
square patch of turf, each with its flower-beds at the foot of the high,
spike-topped boundary fence, few with visible shrubs, fewer still
diversified by grape arbors, most of them criss-crossed with
clothes-lines, several ornamented with whirligigs, all on this moist
November afternoon wringing wet from the steady downpour that came on
with the dawn and broke the boys' hearts, for this was to have been the
match day between the Uncas and the Murray Hills, and Pop's school was
backing the Indians to a man. One more week and winter might be upon
them and the ball season at an end. Verily, it was indeed too bad!
With a yawn of disgust, the shorter boy at the open-topped window threw
up his hands and whirled about. There on the bed lay the precious
base-ball uniform in which he was wont to figure as shortstop. There,
too, lay Snipe's, longer in the legs by nearly a foot. "There's nothing
in-doors but books, Snipy. There's only one thing to tempt a fellow out
in the wet,--a fire, and small chance of that on such a day. We might
take the guns up on the roof and shoot a few skylights or something----"
"Shut up!" said Snipe, at this juncture, suddenly, impetuously throwing
up his hand. "Twenty-third Street!"
Shorty sprang to the window and levelled an old opera-glass at the
summit of an odd white tower that loomed, dim and ghost-like, through
the mist above the housetops quarter of a mile away. Both boys' eyes
were kindling, their lips parting in excitement. Both were on tiptoe.
"Right! Down comes the lever!" was the next announcement. "Upper Fifth,
I'll bet a bat! Listen!"
Suddenly there pealed on the heavy air, solemn and slow, the deep,
mellow tones of a great bell. Even as he counted the strokes each boy
reached for his cap. One--two--three--four!
"Fourth!" cried Shorty. "Come on!" And, light as kittens, away scurried
the two, skimming down three flights of stairs, nearly capsizing a
sedate old butler, snatching their top-coats in the hall, letting
themselves out with a bang, leaping down the broad flight of brownstone
steps to the broader walk below, then spurting away for Union Square,
fast as light-heeled, light-hearted lads could run.