“Eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die.” Not a good excuse,
but it has been sufficient on many occasions to be true. The soldier
on campaign passes life easily. He holds it in no strong grip, and the
Merry Christmas evening is as liable to be spent in the saddle in
fierce contact with the blizzard as in his cosey tepee with his
comrades and his scant cheer. The jug containing the spirits of the
occasion may have been gotten from a town fifty miles away on the
railroad. It is certainly not the distillation of the summer sunlight,
and is probably “tough” enough stuff to mingle naturally with its
surroundings; but if one “drinks no more than a sponge” he may not
have the jaded, retrospective feeling and the moral mending on the day
to come. To sit on a camp chest, and to try and forget that the
soldier’s quart cup is not filled with best in the market, and then to
enter into the full appreciation of the picturesque occasion, is to
forget that long marches, “bull meat,” and sleepless, freezing nights
are in the background. Pleasant hours sit so nicely in their
complemental surrounding of hard ones, since everything in the world
is relative. As to the eating in a cavalry camp on campaign, it is not
overdone, for beans and coffee and bacon and bacon and coffee and
beans come round with sufficient regularity to forestall all
gormandizing. The drinking is not the prominent feature either, but
helps to soften the asperities of a Dakota blizzard which is raging on
the other side of the “ducking.”
[Illustration: THE TOAST: “MERRY CHRISTMAS!”]
The Sibley tent weaves and moans and tugs frantically at its pegs. The
Sibley stove sighs like a furnace while the cruel wind seeks out the
holes and crevices. The soldiers sit in their camp drawing-room
buttoned up to the chin in their big canvas overcoats, and the muskrat
caps are not removed. The freemasonry of the army makes strong
friendships, and soldiers are all good fellows, that being a part of
their business. There are just enough exceptions to prove the rule.
The cold, bloodless, compound-interest snarler is not in the army, and
if he were he would be as cheerless on a damp evening as he would in a
fight. One man is from Arizona, another from Washington, and the rest
from the other corners of Uncle Sam’s tract of land. They have met
before, and memory after memory comes up with its laughter and pathos
of the old campaigns. One by one the “shoulder-straps” crawl in
through the hole in the tepee. And, mind you, they do not walk in like
a stage hero, with dash and abandon and head in the air; they
prostrate themselves like a Turk at prayer, and come crawling. If they
raise the flap ever so much, and bring company of the Dakota winds,
they are met with a howl of protests. After gaining erectness, they
brush the snow from their clothes, borrow a tin cup, and say, “How!
how!”
The chief of scouts buttons up to his eyes, and must go look after his
“Inguns”; the officer of the day comes in to make his papers, and if
he keeps the flying jokes out of his statistics, he does well enough.
The second lieutenant, fresh from West Point, doesn’t hesitate
to address the grizzled colonel of twenty campaigns--nay, he
may even deign to advise him on the art of war; but that is
unsatisfactory--the advising of colonels--because the colonel’s advice
to the sub has always to be acted upon, whereas the sub’s advice to
the colonel is mostly nullified by the great powers of discretion
which are vested in the superior rank. The life-study of a sub should
be to appear like the cuckoo-bird in a German clock--at the proper
moment; and when he appears at wrong intervals, he is repaired.
Colonels are terrible creatures, with vast powers for promoting
happiness or inflicting misery. If he will lend the moderating
influence of his presence, it is well; but if he sends his man around
to “present his compliments, and say that the d---- row will
immediately cease,” his wishes if not his personality are generally
respected.
It is never a late evening, such a one as this; it’s just a few stolen
moments from the “demnition grind.” The last arrival may be a
youngster just in from patrol, who explains that he just “cut the
trail of forty or fifty Sioux five miles below, on the crossing of the
White River;” and you may hear the bugle, and the bugle may blow quick
and often, and if the bugle does mingle its notes with the howling of
the blizzard, you will discover that the occasion is not one of
merriment. But let us hope that it will not blow.
The toasts go around, and you use your tobacco in a miserly way,
because you can’t get any more, since only to-day you have offered a
dollar for a small plug to a trooper, and he had refused to negotiate,
although he had pared off a small piece as a gift, and intimated that
generosity could go no further. Then you go to your tepee, half a mile
down the creek at the scout camp, and you stumble through the
snow-laden willows and face the cutting blast, while the clash and
“Halt!” of the sentinel stop you here and there. You pull off your
boots and crawl into your blankets quickly before the infernal Sibley
stove gives its sigh as the last departing spark goes up the chimney,
and leaves the winds and drifting snows to bellow and scream over the
wild wastes.