Every boy who is good for anything is a natural savage. The scientists
who want to study the primitive man, and have so much difficulty in
finding one anywhere in this sophisticated age, couldn't do better than
to devote their attention to the common country-boy. He has the primal,
vigorous instincts and impulses of the African savage, without any of
the vices inherited from a civilization long ago decayed or developed in
an unrestrained barbaric society. You want to catch your boy young, and
study him before he has either virtues or vices, in order to understand
the primitive man.
Every New England boy desires (or did desire a generation ago, before
children were born sophisticated, with a large library, and with the
word “culture” written on their brows) to live by hunting, fishing, and
war. The military instinct, which is the special mark of barbarism, is
strong in him. It arises not alone from his love of fighting, for the
boy is naturally as cowardly as the savage, but from his fondness for
display,--the same that a corporal or a general feels in decking himself
in tinsel and tawdry colors and strutting about in view of the female
sex. Half the pleasure in going out to murder another man with a gun
would be wanting if one did not wear feathers and gold-lace and stripes
on his pantaloons. The law also takes this view of it, and will not
permit men to shoot each other in plain clothes. And the world also
makes some curious distinctions in the art of killing. To kill people
with arrows is barbarous; to kill them with smooth-bores and flintlock
muskets is semi-civilized; to kill them with breech-loading rifles is
civilized. That nation is the most civilized which has the appliances to
kill the most of another nation in the shortest time. This is the result
of six thousand years of constant civilization. By and by, when the
nations cease to be boys, perhaps they will not want to kill each other
at all. Some people think the world is very old; but here is an evidence
that it is very young, and, in fact, has scarcely yet begun to be a
world. When the volcanoes have done spouting, and the earthquakes are
quaked out, and you can tell what land is going to be solid and keep its
level twenty-four hours, and the swamps are filled up, and the deltas of
the great rivers, like the Mississippi and the Nile, become terra firma,
and men stop killing their fellows in order to get their land and other
property, then perhaps there will be a world that an angel wouldn't
weep over. Now one half the world are employed in getting ready to
kill the other half, some of them by marching about in uniform, and the
others by hard work to earn money to pay taxes to buy uniforms and guns.
John was not naturally very cruel, and it was probably the love of
display quite as much as of fighting that led him into a military life;
for he, in common with all his comrades, had other traits of the savage.
One of them was the same passion for ornament that induces the African
to wear anklets and bracelets of hide and of metal, and to decorate
himself with tufts of hair, and to tattoo his body. In John's day there
was a rage at school among the boys for wearing bracelets woven of
the hair of the little girls. Some of them were wonderful specimens of
braiding and twist. These were not captured in war, but were sentimental
tokens of friendship given by the young maidens themselves. John's own
hair was kept so short (as became a warrior) that you couldn't have made
a bracelet out of it, or anything except a paintbrush; but the little
girls were not under military law, and they willingly sacrificed their
tresses to decorate the soldiers they esteemed. As the Indian is honored
in proportion to the scalps he can display, at John's school the boy
was held in highest respect who could show the most hair trophies on his
wrist. John himself had a variety that would have pleased a Mohawk, fine
and coarse and of all colors. There were the flaxen, the faded straw,
the glossy black, the lustrous brown, the dirty yellow, the undecided
auburn, and the fiery red. Perhaps his pulse beat more quickly under the
red hair of Cynthia Rudd than on account of all the other wristlets put
together; it was a sort of gold-tried-in-the-fire-color to John,
and burned there with a steady flame. Now that Cynthia had become
a Christian, this band of hair seemed a more sacred if less glowing
possession (for all detached hair will fade in time), and if he had
known anything about saints, he would have imagined that it was a part
of the aureole that always goes with a saint. But I am bound to say that
while John had a tender feeling for this red string, his sentiment was
not that of the man who becomes entangled in the meshes of a woman's
hair; and he valued rather the number than the quality of these elastic
wristlets.
John burned with as real a military ardor as ever inflamed the breast of
any slaughterer of his fellows. He liked to read of war, of encounters
with the Indians, of any kind of wholesale killing in glittering
uniform, to the noise of the terribly exciting fife and drum, which
maddened the combatants and drowned the cries of the wounded. In his
future he saw himself a soldier with plume and sword and snug-fitting,
decorated clothes,--very different from his somewhat roomy trousers and
country-cut roundabout, made by Aunt Ellis, the village tailoress, who
cut out clothes, not according to the shape of the boy, but to what
he was expected to grow to,--going where glory awaited him. In his
observation of pictures, it was the common soldier who was always
falling and dying, while the officer stood unharmed in the storm of
bullets and waved his sword in a heroic attitude. John determined to be
an officer.
It is needless to say that he was an ardent member of the military
company of his village. He had risen from the grade of corporal to that
of first lieutenant; the captain was a boy whose father was captain
of the grown militia company, and consequently had inherited military
aptness and knowledge. The old captain was a flaming son of Mars, whose
nose militia, war, general training, and New England rum had painted
with the color of glory and disaster. He was one of the gallant old
soldiers of the peaceful days of our country, splendid in uniform, a
martinet in drill, terrible in oaths, a glorious object when he marched
at the head of his company of flintlock muskets, with the American
banner full high advanced, and the clamorous drum defying the world.
In this he fulfilled his duties of citizen, faithfully teaching his
uniformed companions how to march by the left leg, and to get reeling
drunk by sundown; otherwise he didn't amount to much in the community;
his house was unpainted, his fences were tumbled down, his farm was a
waste, his wife wore an old gown to meeting, to which the captain never
went; but he was a good trout-fisher, and there was no man in town who
spent more time at the country store and made more shrewd observations
upon the affairs of his neighbors. Although he had never been in an
asylum any more than he had been in war, he was almost as perfect a
drunkard as he was soldier. He hated the British, whom he had never
seen, as much as he loved rum, from which he was never separated.
The company which his son commanded, wearing his father's belt and
sword, was about as effective as the old company, and more orderly.
It contained from thirty to fifty boys, according to the pressure of
“chores” at home, and it had its great days of parade and its autumn
maneuvers, like the general training. It was an artillery company,
which gave every boy a chance to wear a sword, and it possessed a small
mounted cannon, which was dragged about and limbered and unlimbered and
fired, to the imminent danger of everybody, especially of the company.
In point of marching, with all the legs going together, and twisting
itself up and untwisting breaking into single-file (for Indian
fighting), and forming platoons, turning a sharp corner, and getting
out of the way of a wagon, circling the town pump, frightening horses,
stopping short in front of the tavern, with ranks dressed and eyes right
and left, it was the equal of any military organization I ever saw. It
could train better than the big company, and I think it did more good
in keeping alive the spirit of patriotism and desire to fight. Its
discipline was strict. If a boy left the ranks to jab a spectator, or
make faces at a window, or “go for” a striped snake, he was “hollered”
at no end.
It was altogether a very serious business; there was no levity about
the hot and hard marching, and as boys have no humor, nothing ludicrous
occurred. John was very proud of his office, and of his ability to keep
the rear ranks closed up and ready to execute any maneuver when the
captain “hollered,” which he did continually. He carried a real sword,
which his grandfather had worn in many a militia campaign on the village
green, the rust upon which John fancied was Indian blood; he had various
red and yellow insignia of military rank sewed upon different parts
of his clothes, and though his cocked hat was of pasteboard, it was
decorated with gilding and bright rosettes, and floated a red feather
that made his heart beat with martial fury whenever he looked at it. The
effect of this uniform upon the girls was not a matter of conjecture. I
think they really cared nothing about it, but they pretended to think
it fine, and they fed the poor boy's vanity, the weakness by which women
govern the world.
The exalted happiness of John in this military service I daresay was
never equaled in any subsequent occupation. The display of the company
in the village filled him with the loftiest heroism. There was nothing
wanting but an enemy to fight, but this could only be had by half the
company staining themselves with elderberry juice and going into the
woods as Indians, to fight the artillery from behind trees with bows
and arrows, or to ambush it and tomahawk the gunners. This, however, was
made to seem very like real war. Traditions of Indian cruelty were still
fresh in western Massachusetts. Behind John's house in the orchard were
some old slate tombstones, sunken and leaning, which recorded the names
of Captain Moses Rice and Phineas Arms, who had been killed by Indians
in the last century while at work in the meadow by the river, and who
slept there in the hope of the glorious resurrection. Phineas
Arms--martial name--was long since dust, and even the mortal part of the great
Captain Moses Rice had been absorbed in the soil and passed perhaps with
the sap up into the old but still blooming apple-trees. It was a quiet
place where they lay, but they might have heard--if hear they could--the
loud, continuous roar of the Deerfield, and the stirring of the long
grass on that sunny slope. There was a tradition that years ago an
Indian, probably the last of his race, had been seen moving along the
crest of the mountain, and gazing down into the lovely valley which had
been the favorite home of his tribe, upon the fields where he grew his
corn, and the sparkling stream whence he drew his fish. John used to
fancy at times, as he sat there, that he could see that red specter
gliding among the trees on the hill; and if the tombstone suggested to
him the trump of judgment, he could not separate it from the war-whoop
that had been the last sound in the ear of Phineas Arms. The Indian
always preceded murder by the war-whoop; and this was an advantage
that the artillery had in the fight with the elderberry Indians. It was
warned in time. If there was no war-whoop, the killing didn't count;
the artillery man got up and killed the Indian. The Indian usually had
the worst of it; he not only got killed by the regulars, but he got
whipped by the home guard at night for staining himself and his clothes
with the elderberry.
But once a year the company had a superlative parade. This was when the
military company from the north part of the town joined the villagers in
a general muster. This was an infantry company, and not to be compared
with that of the village in point of evolutions. There was a great and
natural hatred between the north town boys and the center. I don't know
why, but no contiguous African tribes could be more hostile. It was all
right for one of either section to “lick” the other if he could, or for
half a dozen to “lick” one of the enemy if they caught him alone. The
notion of honor, as of mercy, comes into the boy only when he is pretty
well grown; to some neither ever comes. And yet there was an artificial
military courtesy (something like that existing in the feudal age, no
doubt) which put the meeting of these two rival and mutually detested
companies on a high plane of behavior. It was beautiful to see the
seriousness of this lofty and studied condescension on both sides. For
the time everything was under martial law. The village company being
the senior, its captain commanded the united battalion in the march, and
this put John temporarily into the position of captain, with the right
to march at the head and “holler;” a responsibility which realized all
his hopes of glory. I suppose there has yet been discovered by man no
gratification like that of marching at the head of a column in uniform
on parade, unless, perhaps, it is marching at their head when they
are leaving a field of battle. John experienced all the thrill of this
conspicuous authority, and I daresay that nothing in his later life has
so exalted him in his own esteem; certainly nothing has since happened
that was so important as the events of that parade day seemed. He
satiated himself with all the delights of war.