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THE ARMY MULE
HUMOROUS WAR SKETCHES
by
CAPT. HENRY A. CASTLE
[Illustration: _If he gets loose, he darts through an ambulance
or climbs a tree, without compunction. But he seldom gets loose_]
THE ARMY MULE
AND OTHER WAR SKETCHES
BY
HENRY A. CASTLE
Private, Sergeant-Major and Captain Illinois Volunteers
Past Commander Loyal Legion Commandery of Minnesota
Past Commander Department of Minnesota G. A. R.
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
J. W. VAWTER
INDIANAPOLIS AND KANSAS CITY
THE BOWEN-MERRILL COMPANY
M DCCC XCVIII
Copyright, 1897
BY
THE BOWEN-MERRILL CO.
CONTENTS
PAGE.
I. THE ARMY MULE 1
II. THE SUTLER 91
III. THE SHELTER TENT 140
IV. DRESS PARADE 179
V. THE BOYS IN BLUE GROWN GRAY 218
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
If he gets loose, he darts through an ambulance or climbs a
tree, without compunction. But he seldom gets loose
The quenchless, marvelous mule emerges from the mire and clay,
with a whooping-cough wheeze
But likeliest from safe shelter of some commodious, commanding
stump, observing the struggle with a rural Sunday morning
cheerfulness
Blessed is the voluptuousness of reverie, blessed and cheap as
an expectant clothier's greeting, while he pauses ecstatically
for an appropriate smile
No two companies have been drilled alike; no three consecutive
soldiers perform the same antic at the same time
The veterans quietly gathered in the voluntary and involuntary
honors.... One state points with pride to her nine soldier
governors, and of seven presidents elected since the close of
the war, six were ex-soldiers
* * * * *
I hail thee Brother--spite of the fool's scorn!
And fain would take thee with me, in the dell
Of peace and mild Equality to dwell,
Where Toil shall call the charmer Health his bride,
And Laughter tickle Plenty's ribless side!
How thou wouldst toss thy heels in gamesome play,
And frisk about, as lamb or kitten gay!
Yea! and more musically sweet to me
Thy dissonant harsh bray of joy would be,
Than warbled melodies that soothe to rest
The aching of pale Fashion's vacant breast!
--COLERIDGE.
THE ARMY MULE
I
The longevity of the Mule is proverbial. He lives on and on, until his
origin becomes a musty myth, and age erects a tumor on his brow which
betokens superb development of spirituality. The endurance of a
hallucination is perhaps greater still. Our civil war closed more than
thirty years ago. The Mules employed in the army are mostly dead--not
so the hallucinations. These still linger, picturesque but fatiguing.
There still survives in every northern town and village at least one
man who habitually asserts, who is willing to verify by affidavit,
worst of all, who steadfastly believes, that he put down the
rebellion.
The Mules are not supposed to have understood the war, and
consequently can not be expected to hold themselves responsible for
its results. But the man of distorted perspective, who measures the
circumference of the universe by the diameter of his own egotism,
shrinks from no exaltation and shirks no responsibility. He is
festooned with self-complacency, wearing always a fourteenth century
smile of content.
Controversy is welcome to him, as the advent of a bloomer woman to a
social purity club. He relishes argument and he loves to boast. He can
readily maintain that his side was eternally right and the other side
infernally wrong in the war, for that fact is beginning to be somewhat
widely accepted. To establish his own feats is somewhat more
difficult, whether he sing like Miriam or howl like Jeremiah in
narrating them. But he will cheerfully spend a week in marching one of
his deeds past a given point, and skeptics soon discover that it is
cheaper to feed him than to fight him. He may be an ex-major-general,
or possibly an ex-teamster. Sometimes he is an ex-corporal, mellow as
those autumnal days when the golden glory of the sassafras vies with
the persimmon's gaudy crimson. Oftenest perhaps he is an ex-captain,
for does not every war evolve the greatest captain of the age as its
ultimate hero? He may now pass for a respectable citizen, with houses
to let and money to burn, who rashly trusts to his imagination when
his memory is out of focus, and lets the bloody chasm go on yawning
for more gore.
More likely, however, he carries his real estate as well as his
religion in his wife's name, fully persuaded that a rolling stone
gathers no moss but grinds exceeding fine, razors and tomahawks
included. In any event he is a mighty talker before the crowd,
bristling with home thrusts that give out a sizzling sound and an odor
of roast owl. He is a Chimborazo of noise with an ant-hill of
achievement to back it; a miracle of linked hallucinations ludicrously
elongated; an extinct incandescent carbon belching black smoke. His
sole claim to mention in connection with the useful, unpretentious
Mule, is the purely accidental circumstance of their simultaneous
military service. He has no other title to consideration in this
important historical episode.
He is not a typical old soldier, and must not be so classified. He is
an exception. When tests are to be applied he can always prove an
alibi. His mouth was put on soft and spread; the flush on his nose was
acquired at a great expenditure of time and money. He comes to the
front in his community, sage of the flannel lip and velvet eye, in
accordance with a known law that not always the ablest men are heard,
but always the ablest to be heard. He comes to the front with the
persistence of a pardoned anarchist, and the flawless joy of a
yearling who has maxed in math.
Meantime it is one of the everlasting verities that in hands of men
"entirely" great, the calligraph is mightier than the bludgeon. Shall
calligraphs stand dumb and the story of days when God shook the nation
until her lakes foamed over their pebbly shores and her rivers
gurgled with bloody ebullition remain unwrit, in fear of probing
blow-holes in the record of some grand snark in the concatenated order
of hoo hoos? Shall posterity be given over to moral mushiness, lest
some village Goliath of Gath, prone to such nightly exhilaration of
spirits as ends in losing the combination of adjacent streets, get
shrunken into shreds of paper-rag, brain-web and vapor?
Historians of the war have minutely narrated its grand events--events
which rising generations are already reproaching themselves for coming
too late to engage in, being relegated to their own nerveless annals
penciled on the segment of a film. Most classes of participants in
these events have been heard from. Either in plain narrative or
wrathful controversy they have ventured an enormous consumption of
time and eternity. Whether their anger be a dynamite shell or a
soap-bubble, its vocalization is uniformly terrific. The generals and
the majors; the teamsters and the staff; even the drafted men and
substitutes, unstable as the heroine who vowed at first that she would
never consent, and then relented--all these have spoken or can speak
for themselves. Majestically muscled around the mouth, staunchly
nerved in the cheek, they need no rhetorical proxy. Since history has
accepted most of their averments, they modestly consider themselves
endorsed.
There are other classes of participants who must be spoken for--their
merits have not yet become the theme of tropical, topical songs. The
speechless toilers of the conflict, half horse, half devil, half
donkey, stand high on the list of those who should not be forgotten.
We may fling flash-lights of inspection all around the black horizon
of war and find no greater faithfulness, not even in Israel.
Under the cadence of march, murmur of camp, clangor of battle and
reverberating paeans of victory, rumbles the ground tone of all war's
harmonies, the deep contra basso of a melodious bray, reminding us
that justice remains yet to be done to the instrument which made
campaigns successful and battles possible. It is an instrument to
which due credit has never been given, yet which is infinitely more
credit-worthy than many of the boasters, "ablest to be heard," who
make the cackle of their villages noxious to mankind.
That instrument is the Army Mule! Let him who hath ears to hear lend
them now to a belated attempt at vindication. Let the man of prejudice
disinfect his mind and listen. It is naught, saith the buyer, then
goeth his way and boasteth; but an _ad valorem_ tax on dudes has never
been made to yield any revenue.
The name of the original inventor of the Mule is lost in the
immemorial mists. Although, as hereinbefore intimated, his longevity
is a chestnut as old as the Morse alphabet, or older, his nativity is
still a conundrum. No Mule's teeth, with or without gold filling,
glisten among shells of the pliocene period. No Mule elevates his
afterdeck in the granitic formations. None of his petrified footprints
are discernible in those anteglacial basins where Afric's sunny
fountains now sprinkle her shirtless swarms. Hence, although he
possibly antedates all living apostles of lady suffrage, he is
presumably not a pre-Adamite. Perhaps his first discoverer was "that
Anah" who, to his astonishment, "found Mules in the wilderness," where
donkeys had been browsing, etc. See Genesis xxxvi, 24. It is not
permissible to go behind the returns. What we know is that he was
introduced to the American people by anticipation, that is to say,
through his paternal ancestor, by G. Washington, Esq., of Mount Vernon
in Virginia.
Much sarcasm, variegated as Paris green jealousy and red precipitate
wrath could dye it, has been expended on this delicate matter of the
Mule's paternal ancestry. Among other spiteful things it has been
averred that like certain party organizations he has no more ground
for pride of descent than he has for hope of posterity. Let us
promptly concede the validity of the averment. Argue not with one
steeped in kerosene and other fire-waters; matters look ominous when a
disputant opens the discussion with foam on his teeth and noises in
his nostril. Fill blanks as to name of party by majority vote of those
present, and let the proceedings proceed.
It is doubtless true that the speechless, unspeakable Mule, seldom
troubles himself about his heirs, executors or administrators. Why
should he? He is a monstrosity, physical and metaphysical; the _ne
plus ultra_, the "nothing beyond" of his species. Besides, he has
little of value to bequeath; he is a disinherited prodigal, with
champagne tastes and a root beer revenue, digesting his diet of wild
oats; his assets would scarcely overbalance those of a disbanded Uncle
Tom troupe--one blood hound, one death-bed, and two cakes of imitation
ice. Moreover, truth to tell, he is probably in no special haste to
die. This amiable weakness is shared by certain of our own race.
A hypercritical Boston lady, mistress of the mysteries of nine idioms
and five kinds of angel cake, was heard to declare that she would
rather not die at all than be buried anywhere outside Mount Auburn.
The speechless, discredited Mule, born old, wise and fuzzy, has
little to thank his paternal ancestors for, save phenomenal ears that
not even a lion's skin can hide, as witness AEsop, and a phenomenal
voice that no lion's roar can drown. Both these heritages were
preordained for grand service in an epoch when war should gnash loud
her iron fangs, and shake her crest of bristling bayonets. Vouchsafe
unto the male line gratitude for little else. But as for the female
line, who knows? Possibly it runs back to "Araby the blest," where
horse pedigrees are cherished like a Connecticut coffee pot, until
they fade into genealogical perspectives. Such perspectives, for
example, as make the fine art of heraldic blazonry, frescoing and
retouching precious to the British nobility--some of whom, by the way,
have much less cause than the nameless, unblamable Mule, to canonize
the low-neck and short-sleeve branch of their lineage.
Although we do not know precisely who invented the Mule, it must be
obvious that he is not a historical tenderfoot. He is not a mere
ephemeral product of the county fair season, when alleged acrobats
with leaky balloons monopolize the casualty columns. Neither is he one
of those picturesque gubernatorial giraffes of the populist era, who
come unwanted and go unwept.
Notwithstanding the fact that he is necessarily renewed with each
generation, he belongs to an old family--one, in fact, fairly rancid
with antiquity. He was the unconsidered drudge of the hoariest
ancients, in those days when the average human heart could be readily
split up for floor tiles. He had been promoted thence to the rank of
mail carrier as long ago as when Mordecai the Jew "sent letters by
riders on Mules" from Babylon, after the king had turned the rascals
out with a promptness that compelled the admiration of every taxpayer.
He was bestridden by sprigs of royalty as long ago as when Absolom the
lengthy-locked rode under the boughs of a great oak, wherein his hair
became entangled, "and the Mule that was under him went away,"--thus
sayeth the Scriptures! Unspeakable Mule, fraught with immeasurable
destinies! Had he stood until great David's shear-bearers could come
up and cut loose the best-beloved, the whole current of Israel's
history might have changed, saving vast research to the modern
sensational divine working a heresy advertisement for all there is in
it. Solomon, next-beloved, might never have reigned; his superfluous
seven hundred wives and his indispensable three hundred concubines,
with their lissome, lightsome round of free hand riots, internal and
interminable, might never have been accumulated; neither seen the
sparkle of his three thousand proverbs, nor heard the ripple of his
songs a thousand and five.
It is thus manifest that although this interesting hybrid is virtually
an afterthought, he is not one of those later-day improvements in a
chronic state of apology. This is authentic. It is also reassuring to
such typical, representative citizens weighing three hundred pounds
each as still have misgivings. Had the speechless unspeakable Mule
been simply an unperfected modern invention in the rough, his hair not
yet dry, his effectiveness and hope of glory would have been greatly
lessened. The surviving boasters "ablest to be heard" now on grassy
village streets, with two million major-generals, colonels, first
sergeants and other soldiers, might never have been able to suppress
the most causeless and wicked rebellion ever waged by an army of
barefooted chevaliers, fed on corn meal, sporadic acid and gunpowder,
always in light marching order. N. B. They were always in hard
fighting order likewise, since by an eternal law increment of bile is
superinduced by shrinkage of commissariat.
Almost any mediocre can compile a mass of information from the
cyclopedia. Even the vague enthusiast who goes through the world
wearing an air of crushed strawberry resignation on his face and
shaking hands with one finger can do that. But it is not the
desideratum in a matter of this sort.
People prefer to see things step out with stereoscopic rotundity. Like
the juvenile Lochinvar, they stay not for stone and stop not for air
brakes. They demand the decentralization of apothegms. They desire
sculpture from a chisel that, ignoring down and dimple, cuts thought
and carves breath from the marble, without risk of challenge for
implied bias. In the absence of stone-cutters, let a cyclopedia
furnish from its cold-storage vaults some preliminary fundamentals. If
they be plain, ascertainable, intelligible statements of fact, clothed
in tights as it were, devoid of frills and amplifications, so much the
better--and briefer! I quote:
"The Mule seems to excel both its ancestral species in natural
intelligence. It is remarkable for its powers of muscular endurance.
Its sure-footedness particularly adapts it to mountainous countries.
It has been common from very ancient times in many parts of the East,
and is much used, also, in most of the countries around the
Mediterranean Sea, and in the mountainous parts of South America.
Great care is bestowed on the breeding of Mules in Spain and Italy,
and those of particular districts are highly esteemed. In ancient
times the sons of kings rode on Mules, and they were yoked in
chariots. They are still used to draw the carriages of Italian
cardinals and other ecclesiastical dignitaries."
And more to the same effect.
We respectfully submit that here is a well-buttressed certificate of
character which fully justified the government in assigning to this
useful equine mulatto the important function he performed in putting
down the rebellion.
The average American Mule has not the soft fur, fine as dressed
seal-skin and smooth as coffin varnish, nor the rich shades of
coloring, worn by his pampered kinfolk of Spain or Cyprus or Smyrna.
As to skin, he was, habitually, neither soft nor shining, he was
simply tough. As to color, his muzzle was always whitish, as if fresh
from a meal-tub, but otherwise he was more various than delectable,
sometimes yellow, sometimes dun, sometimes sorrel, but oftenest
darkly, deeply, beautifully bay. Second cousin to the New Mexican
burro, but happily guiltless of any traceable relationship to the
disreputable Texas mustang, his aspect was liable to be as one-sided
as a Louisiana riot--seventeen negroes killed and one white man
slightly wounded.
But texture and color apart, the harmless, unspeakable servitor of our
march and camp was doubtless peer of any the effete monarchies of
Europe or the East can boast. He had no overplus of style about him,
but he was reliable, he was sincere, his muscularity was conceded by
all. His facial angle was a convex curve, which somewhat impaired his
beauty, but not his utility. Some knew him who did not love him; few
named him except to praise after a reasonable acquaintance. His air of
innocent gravity was sometimes mistaken for stupidity--most
inexcusable and fatal error! He could look as imbecile as a rustic fop
playing "Glory Hallelujah" on an accordeon. He could look as guileless
as the youth who murdered his own father and mother and then begged
the judge to have mercy on a poor orphan. He could look as soulful as
a law clerk summing up to a jury of one with his arm around it. He
could look as sober as though his whole intellect were grinding on the
plus and minus of some unsolved problem, like that for example which
the Book of Mormon and Mohammed's Koran and Clark's Commentaries, with
all their attention to detail, have neglected, whether Aaron's golden
calf was a Holstein or a Jersey.
Sleepy or asleep he may have seemed, but let some small darkey imp of
mischief tweak his patient ear, then note how swiftly that magnetic
hoof will lift the tweaker to a pearly seat amidst the celestial
cherubim--direct and speedy circuit of nerve-telephone here manifest,
without the intervention of any dilatory central office. His drooping
lids were thus but the token of a measureless content, which craved
not the mere bric-a-brac and gumdrops of existence. But it was liable
to shift its specific gravity, if any misfit perfume came between the
wind and his nobility, and explode in a sudden touch-and-go style,
rocket-like, trigger-like, flashing.
He could smile like a heavenly blessing. His expressive yawn was
widely eminent; without it no Mule was genuine. His bray, opening
clear and sonorous, like the report of a judiciary committee, rapidly
shaded off into a succession of disembodied shrieks and disemboweled
groans, that sent thrills of suicidal delirium through all the
encircling camps. No further seek his general merits to disclose. They
developed constantly on the sensitive plate of our regard, and we have
waited long for somebody to take off a blue-print of his ground plan
and front elevation. The possessor of many virtues, poor but honest,
with a large circulation but small political influence, sagacious and
serene he stood, thick of head, tough of hide, hard of heel, the
proffered hero of the expressive army shibboleth, "Here's your Mule."
The plutonic, speechless quadruped, Mule, like the platonic
featherless biped, man, after being inspected on the hoof, was obliged
to graduate through the three military degrees of Recruit, Soldier and
Veteran.
We all remember those recruiting days; those first companies of picked
men, mostly picked before they were ripe; when the fray was curtained
behind song and hurrah, the cataract obscured by the rainbow. Who can
forget the wrathful buzz and ferment, the wild tossing and writhing
and moaning of an aroused people; the fierce uprising; the keen
razor-edge of fervor. Then the enrolling and drilling and marching and
evoluting in the moonlit squares and streets; the nocturnal
visitations, with fife and drum, to the verandas of oratorical
patriots for a "night-cap" of glowing speech, alternated with raids on
suspected disloyalists to demand the prompt uphoisting of the star
spangled banner. Saxon and Norman and Dane were we, or Celt or Teuton
in birth or descent, but all of us then crystallized in the alembic of
patriotism into the first generation of unadulterated Americans.
To the blasphemous challenge of secession, our young men, fully
advised of the exceeding preciousness of life and yet thoroughly
instructed how to dare and die, hurled back deathless daring and
defiance. Their eyes, fixed on their idealized leaders, shining like
white statues amid the black wreckage of rebellion, they marched into
the flaming vortex with new, strange implements in their hands and
"hot unutterabilities in their hearts."
These were the boys of '61, the raw recruits of the dawning conflict.
With them went the memory of the girls they left behind them, many of
whom were afterwards lost in the shuffle. But the memory, then
infinitely sweet, was hourly refreshed by a contemplation of the
tangible Testament and pin-cushion. With them went the toe-ache of
tight boots, earthly, sensual, devilish, and a flushed consciousness,
even when drilling in the awkward squad, that the eyes of the universe
were upon them. With them also, or following them, or mayhap meeting
them in the dreamy borderland of Kentucky or Missouri to which he is
fortuitously indigenous, went the harmless, necessary Mule.
He was a child of wrath, with a throat for melody spacious as the
funnel of a cyclone; with dexter and sinister ears of renown; with
eyes foxy but sad, and saddest when he sang. He carried with him the
appetite of a Chippewa maiden clad in cavalry trowsers and a tentfly;
also an inherited capacity to stand indefinitely on one foot and kick
vehemently with all the others. He was reliable as grandfather's clock
and prompt as the railway mail service. He was under a recognizance to
support the constitution of the United States, and stamp out the
Confederacy to the best of his ability.
He was a raw recruit likewise. When men were beating the wrong way
their plowshares into swords, he was out of a job on a dull labor
market and could the better be spared. How much of the issues and
principles at stake his comprehensive intelligence intelligently
comprehended will perhaps never be known. He did not attend crowded
war meetings in country school-houses and waste his rhetoric on the
fetid air. It may fairly be surmised, however, that he knew better
than any northern croaker the futility of trying to repossess our
surrendered fortresses with writs of replevin; knew better than any
southern fire-eater the folly of attempting to build up a republic
with a live negro wriggling under the corner-stone; knew and would
gladly have proclaimed, that no lapse of slip-shod years, no
hoariness of unchallenged usage, no deftest hammerings of forensic
sophistry can ever fashion a vested right out of a ragged wrong.
At all events, whether wittingly or willingly or neither, he became as
potent a factor in the situation militant as when Samson slew a
thousand Philistines with the jawbone of one of his remote ancestors.
He wheeled into line useful, ubiquitous, proud as a deceased
Connemarran with a solid silver door-plate on his pearl-plush casket,
blazoning his immortal virtues--also quite numerous. A total of
450,000 mules and 650,000 horses served in the various armies. In
1864, the forces actually in the field required for artillery, cavalry
and trains one-half as many animals as there were soldiers.
As a recruit, the Mule soon became an object of usurious rates of
interest and concentrated curiosity. He was a drawing card, a
veritable bargain counter or church scandal in his tractile powers.
His fame had preceded him, and his name was a potent talisman for
conjuring ecstatic assemblages. His name pronounced, the sensation
seekers gathered, as in the manipulation of complicated governmental
machinery congress touches the button, and the department clerks do
the rest, subject to approval of the salary and allowance division.
Haled in, unhaltered, from amid the frisking bluegrass felicities of
his pasture primeval, with his tail full of burs and his gaze full of
vinegar, the details of his primary instruction were, as a rule, full
of activity and enthusiasm.
In mischievous impulse he is fertile as those human scalps which raise
hair enough for home consumption, and send a surplus to market twice a
year. His venturesome instructors are wise if they make their
testamentary dispositions in advance, and provide abundant bandages
and plasters, with blank coupons or certified checks attached to
provide for extra dividends. One out-thrust of his right front foot
has been known to reduce a newly uniformed soldier to a state of
nudity from his napless crown to his callous sole, with incidental
contusions of flesh and abrasions of cuticle too hideous for
contemplation.
Enmeshed in surreptitious cordage, the speechless, untamed quadruped
is thrown to the cold, cold ground, where, for a time, he writhes and
struggles, a _cheveaux-de-frise_ of black, gyrating hoofs. If he gets
loose, he darts through an ambulance or climbs a tree without
compunction. But he seldom gets loose. When his first wild anger has
been measurably spent and the mercury in him has gone down to the
bulb, five or six bow-legged hirelings of the quartermaster's bureau,
with waffle-iron cast of countenance born of small-pox, simultaneously
proceed to administer disjointed sections of harness to the exterior
of that noble form.
Puck might girdle the earth for forty cents, but he could earn forty
dollars in girthing a cadet Mule. With each contact of strap or buckle
the white of his eye gleams poisonously and his outraged epidermis
gives a sudden convulsive shudder, like a fine lady's bare shoulder
vitalized by a mosquito-bite. But he is helpless and supine as a fat
alderman after a banquet, lying stomach upwards and feebly
gesticulating with his heels. With the final linking together of the
detached tackle into one engirdling gearage, the first step in his
humiliation is completed, and the pantings of his suppressed fury
mingle with the chokings of his self-contempt. From that hour he is a
changed Mule. Man delights him not, nor small boys either. Straps
leave invisible, indelible marks of servitude, as a blow from a parent
leaves a scar on the soul of the child. Harnessed and humiliated,
abased and abashed, the higher regions of pride and independence
wherein he has pranced with all the lofty grace of a thoroughbred,
know him no more forever. Mirabeau had swallowed all formulas. The
Mule recruit has swallowed all traditions, foretaste of much else,
good and bad, he will be obliged to swallow,--but the bridle-bit, of
all fabricated things, alas! he can not swallow.
In this clinging, clanking harness-toggery cribbed and confined, he is
led out to where five shamefaced fellow-martyrs wait to endure with
him the culminating indignity. The Mule units are now to be transmuted
into a Mule team, for the glory of Yankee Doodle, and an entirely
novel programme of acrobatic marvels is to be enacted.
No sooner have the predestined six been, with infinite patience and
circumspection, aligned and coupled and to the monstrous vehicle
deftly attached, than down they all go in a heap, a rolling, plunging
mass of offensive partisanship, in one dusty burial blent. Entangled,
prostrate, writhing like a coil of rattlesnakes; each eager nose, and
active heel, and tufted tail, points all ways at once, like a
mariner's needle in a thunder-storm. In this tumbling, tearing glomer
a philosopher might presciently discern the symbol and essence of
anarchy, the spirit of centrifugality, the revolt against _status
quo_, the protest of energetic natures against human government, or
self-government, or any other government.
It may confidently be averred that from all vital chaos a new lathed
and plastered order is ever shaping itself and emerging; this is as
certain as that everybody is greater than anybody, and that discipline
is always brought forth by a Caesarian operation from anarchy. So from
this sour animal effervescence of insurrection miraculously unravels
at last, scathless and satisfied, a melancholy sextette of curbed and
baffled penitents. They are awkward, divergent, unassimilated, to
begin with, and must be pounded and kicked and cursed into homogeneity
later on, but they are uproariously recalcitrant thenceforth never
more.
The Mule recruit has thus rapidly developed into the Mule soldier. He
has been summarily mustered in, with a rope around his lower lip
rasping it to rawness, but without any very searching inquiries as to
his uncertain age, his wholly immaterial sex, his superfluous name, or
his complicated social status.
He has been blacksmithed as to hoof (much against his will), and
veterinaried as to shoulder. He must now march forth in the name of
the Union and emancipation, but must first be introduced to his
commander--and so must you, my beloved. Ye who have blushes to blush
for your species, prepare to blush them now, and then proceed to bury
Caesar, not to praise him.
The army teamster may be safely diagnosed as a chronic malady of war
times. With such rare and radiant exceptions as the immortal nominee
of the Seattle caucus, who carried a hare-lip and a pure heart, he was
a pestilent metaplasm. He was a product of heterogeneous aggregation
and the survival of misfits. His status was fixed in earliest infancy;
when he was vaccinated, the doctor is suspected of having thrown away
the child and saved the virus capsule. He professed no patriotism; he
pretended to no bravery; he cherished no martial ambitions. He had no
desire to fight. There was no need of an order to show cause why a
temporary injunction should not issue restraining him from carnage.
When his slim sweetheart, the dove-eyed, flat-chested maiden at Onion
creek, a stuttering siren to be courted only on the installment plan,
sent him to the field, it was with full assurance that he was not lost
to her forever--not he! The corn-fed, lank Delilah shrewdly guessed
that her prudent wooer would listen to battle's dissonant thunders
from posts of distant security, and come back unshot, unsabred, but
covered with vicarious glory, which he did. Heaven is merciful to the
idiotic and kind to the cautious. His previous occupations had varied
from cord-wood carpentry to slaughter-house surgery, and he had always
been disposed to shed perspiration with extreme diffidence. He was
mostly red-headed. He had been addicted to excess of raw spirits,
tobacco and other abominations--loving these, his enemies, with a
fine, magnanimous, scriptural, discrimination. He may be relied on to
fill a drunkard's grave some day, probably without even asking the
drunkard's permission; such are his knavish proclivities. His eye was
aglare with hate, every glance a stab. His occasional smile ran
through all the gamut of grins, from the smirk of conceit to the
simper of toadyism. He had a torpid liver and was no trustee of
beauty. His physical development was surprising; even an Englishman
never saw anything equal to it--outside of England. He was strong as
the Kansas zephyr that carried an anvil ten miles and came back next
morning after the hammer. Freckles were his trade-mark and profanity
was the staunch, infallible test of his identity. Huge quadrilateral
oaths, shingled with brimstone and fringed with fire, were the soft
relaxations of his happier hours. Blue, blistering maledictions,
flecked with white foam, marked the approach of his paroxysmal
frenzies, and no postponement on account of the weather.
Cruelty uncloaked and unleavened, lumpy and rocky, was the energizing
motor of his existence. Before he gets three strides into his gait,
his antiphlogistic treatment always insures a dispersion of the Mule's
vitality into the extremeties--hence those kicks. His vocabulary was a
slimy ooze of the gutter, with its wailing stench. His breath was the
whiff of loose-corked, all-night gin shops, stale and stifling. His
typical caress to the Mule was a blow on the bone of the nose with a
neck yoke that settled the animal on his haunches. With a heart false
as a weather bulletin, more selfish than a petroleum trust, and colder
than a funeral with plenty of money and no God in it, his advent
might readily portend that direful apocalyptic sequence: Death on the
pale horse and hell not far behind. He was generally hare-lipped.
To the tender mercies of this losel vile were committed by the decrees
of inscrutable fate the career and destiny of the speechless,
undecipherable Mule, who was often simultaneously off his feed and on
to his driver. He may have been an unattractive, non-magnetic
quadruped, a ragged hammerhead, with a wall eye and an amputated ear;
with yellow, irregular teeth and a surplus of lip. But his redeeming
features were sure to be disclosed in the end. The current acceptation
of the normal order of things in civil life was no criterion here;
there would be scant toleration for the methodical youth who indorsed
his sweetheart's first love-letter "Exhibit A."
Ordinarily, when man, a little lower than the angels, bestrides a Mule
unquestionably possessed of the devil, he starts on a basalt road to
perdition, safe to arrive. Swift as a commuter's kiss at the ferry
gang-plank might be expected the direful finale. But in this zigzag of
military contradictions things are reversed. The man and the beast
have changed places. The semi-seraph and brevet horse have been
subjected to a mysterious transformation of functions, and gravitation
working t'other way lifts things skyward, as it were. The man sinks;
the animal soars--thrusting his jaw out sidewise in a satisfied yawn,
secure in the serenity of his asininity.
By sin pneumonia came into the world, and the docile aboriginal, with
dilapidated undergarments, or none, became a shining mark. The honest,
intelligent Mule restores an equilibrium of virtue lost through his
depraved and dissolute driver. The virtues of the Mule atone for the
vices of the man. He raises the average of merit and sum total of
achievement, so that credit for their joint share in the grand
climacteric will be as enduring as the solemn temples, the great globe
itself.
Man approximated to the Mule ideal of gentility when he began to
suspect that the entire system of army team discipline rested on a
false basis. But that suspicion had not dawned at the close of the war
for the suppression of the rebellion--if, indeed, it has yet dawned.
The platform of the Mule millennial: Six quarts of oats at a feed; a
blanket; two curry-combs of assorted fineness; no spurs; no whip; no
cursing--this was a dim vision of futurity; alluring but delusive as
the seductive rustle of grain in a tin pan, with the ensnaring halter
deftly hidden.
Fortunately for the Mule his epidermis was thick and tough, a
non-conductor of pain, as it were; fortunately for his flagitious
tormentor, likewise for other glowing lights of genus human, he was
speechless. If the Mule could talk! What new aspects would be given to
war-memoirs; what side-gleams would be thrown on historic events; what
showers and floods of reinforcement would be added to the gurgling,
vasty streams of patriotic reminiscence. He had his opinions on the
conduct of the war, and on the character of the warriors, also the
teamsters; but those opinions remain unrecorded and to all intents and
purposes unexpressed. He reserved them, which would be deliciously
sweet of him, don't you know, if it had not been involuntary and
unavoidable.
Out in Oregon, apples grow to the diameter of Daniel Webster's skull,
though with diluted flavor and contradictory aromas, it is claimed;
but the inefficiently tutored Shoshone nevertheless affects his
_dejeuner_ of decayed salmon whose aroma is indisputable and widely
permeative. Arizona, latitude some hundreds of feet below the sea
level, offers a splendid climate in exceptionally large quantities,
where the insidious and terrible tubercle is unknown; but some of her
citizens are accused of entertaining loose opinions as to the strict
enforcement of law, and low, coarse views of the editorial function.
At Spuyten-Duyvel-on-Hudson, the local four hundred, exploiting the
astrakhan hair and chinchilla whiskers inherited from a fused Iroquois
and Rotterdam ancestry, can only be coaxed into activity by an
elaborate expenditure of stimulants; then, however, they will very
cheerfully pump you full of sententious legendary lore while you wait.
In Rhode Island, walk under the mistletoe with a young lady and
tradition will do the rest. In Chicago, hand an attractive widow out
of a cable car, and gossips will supply all necessary additional
ingredients for a five-column sensation. Thus every locality has its
advantages and its drawbacks, its vexations and its compensations. By
parallel lines of illustration it may be demonstrated that what the
Mule lacks in volubility he fully makes up in sagaciousness.
The capacity of this observant, discriminating animal to sit in
judgment on the character of his stridulous driver can scarcely be
subject to reasonable question. The judicial cast of intellect is so
universally associated with solemnity of visage that the terms become
substantially interconvertible, like the principles of a polished
politician. When the Army Mule lowers his head and lifts his eyebrows
and searches profoundly through his stable litter with his
deliberative hoof, the rich trolley-line tenor of his tuneful
meditations were worth a royal largess to read, assimilate and store
away for reference.
The animated dialogue between a truckman and a cab driver in a New
York street blockade is said to embody linguistic traits and miracles
of lexicography peculiar to the atmosphere of that latitude. The
murmurings of a town that is stricken with paralysis at the first
intimations of a whisky famine, are marvelously intense and realistic.
But the Army Mule's honest and unbiased opinion as to the true
character of the army teamster, translated from his equi-asinine
vernacular, and rendered into the anglo-effervescent jargon of the
bivouac, would rattle like a regimental long-roll and yield aroma
rivaling the effluvium of a lime-kiln. His reprobate tormentor, with
no perceptible circulation of blood above the ears, presents
multiplied testimonials of having long been habitually fed on
aqua-fortis, hell-broth and ratsbane. Yet he reveals a cruel coldness
that would freeze the milk in a mother's wasted breast or the marrow
in her infant's fleshless bones. Hideous as is his chimpanzee
conformation of countenance inherited from root-eating ancestors, it
only indexes his whole physical structure--a sour aggregation of
compost, vitalized by a fetid protoplasm. Within his Nova Zembla skull
the pulpy and mysterious growth called brain lies fusty and fumid,
steeped in the vapidity of its own purulence.
Offspring of the exiled offal and offscourings of civilization, he
grew up in the back settlements untaught, untrained, unkempt,
unchristened--not even vaccinated or manicured; and the
unwholesomeness of his exhalations vie with the complexities of his
vocabulary. The bath-room knows him never, nor tooth-brush ever. To
night-shirt, napkin, finger-bowl and fine stationery he is as utterly
alien as the remotest autocrat of Congo's jungles. The Indian has now
become about as bad as the white man can make him. But it is the firm
opinion of the Army Mule that there are lower depths. Somewhere
between the Indian's level and that bottomless perdition, where the
arches of Tophet redden in the glow of its quenchless flame, there is
a midway plaisance tableland, reserved transcendent in its horrors for
the ruminating promenades of the teamster terrific. Somewhat lower
than the Indian; a little higher than satan and his imps--not
much--there is the plane of character assigned with ghoulish gladness
to the hare-lipped caliph of the wagon train, by one best fitted,
through intimate, hourly association, to measure his moral girth and
estimate his mental altitude. There let him roam and range. In years
triumphant of the war era, now fast vanishing into the vague and misty
past, he had his jubilant day. This bog-spawn of humanity, with his
ashes-of-marigold face and his unthatched upper teeth, with his
three-cornered hot temper that scorned life's amenities; this slouchy
man with moist nostrils and an affliction in his left hip, who at one
time hoped to sometime shine as chambermaid to a livery stable but
failed, has run his course.
What a child is taught in the abstract he is liable to practice in the
concrete, as his subjectivity develops into objectivity, his sentiment
into devilment. The Mule driver's unamiable childhood was punctuated
with copious threats that the goblins of desperation would get him if
he didn't watch out. The events of his pseudo war experience fully
verified this dreadful prophecy's prophetic inspiration. The goblins
got him and energized him, until his fury often bade fair to shred the
Mule into his by-products of kip-leather, trousers buttons and
mucilage.
Under such inauspicious guidance and control, the army Mule, luckily
pachydermatous, proceeds to the theater of his sanguinary exploits.
The rich girl is often in danger of falsifying her accounts by
crediting to her personality the charms of her cash. But the cashless,
unsusceptible Mule stands in no peril of such baleful self-deception.
Lowest in rank of created beings assigned a part in the drama, fame
held to him no prismatic rewards for excess of zeal.
He was not built for a general range of cynosure business; homeliness
was his heritage from the day he was foaled. He was unpoetic as a miss
receiving her beau in the parlor with her two younger brothers sitting
in the seat of the scornful hard by. He was unartistic as a Montana
hurricane kite--an iron shutter with a tail made of log-chains. He
was unsymmetric as a court dwarf with scythe-snath spine and a dome on
his shoulder. Hence for the splendid immortality of sculpture he was
ludicrously inapt. And if painting deigned to give him grudged space
it was ever in the burlesque of cartoonage or the dim littleness of
background.
His lucky half-brother, the showy, exaggerated horse, in all classes,
from the pampered ex-trotter with his slim neck and his record, to the
bloated muldoon of the belt-line, jaded but defiant, was an easy
victor in the suit Neigh _versus_ Bray. To him might come sweet
visions of promotion in the life that is and artistic apotheosis in a
glad hereafter. But to the speechless, unapproachable Mule, with
periodical reactions in the hind leg, and hight merely "nigh" or "off"
in the vernacular, promotion never came. Cogitating to himself with
soulful grunts, he could only talk through his head-stall.
Even the sutler's horse, intoed, sway-backed and wheezy, who had
habitually worn a ragged calfskin over his rump as he stood on frosty
nights before the war, tied to a rail fence while his owner talked
politics in the village grocery, claimed superiority. The picturesque
talisman U. S. upon his shoulder was the only badge of honor permitted
to the Army Mule, save when the whip-lash had cut out a slice of his
skin as a souvenir. But even this significant lettering was often so
inexpertly executed as to serve no decorative purpose whatever. It was
infinitely less effective than a bran mash to poultice his internal
pains, or a roached mane to command external admiration. With one foot
over the trace and both eyes blinking, the last state of that Mule was
worse than the first. To him all alleged or attempted adornments were
superfluous and unsatisfying.
Here then was the sine of an arc which did not recognize equality in
the cosine of its supplement. The sorriest horse, though just released
from the duty of transporting miscellaneous triturations of real
estate in a dumpcart, with his alimentary system painfully void of
toothsome internal decoration, outranked the smoothest, softest Mule,
whether young or aged, black or sorrel, dun or gray. Nevertheless the
explanation of the fact that a rat-tailed cat-hammed Mule weighing
five hundred and thirty pounds, saw-backed, sharktoothed, and knobby
with protruding bones from throat-latch to crupper, could draw heavier
loads than a round robust Norman-Percheron horse weighing a ton,
remains to this day unknown, unguessable. Invidious comparison is
gross violation of consanguinity equal to marrying one's widow's
sister. The checked, banged and bitted high steppers of Fairmount
park, dear to the heart of placid quakers because their nerves can
endure the strain of "Curfew Shall Not Toll Tonight," or equivalent
atrocities, will not be involved therein; their pinked tennis-tan
harness, silver trimmed, with monograms at the joints and red stitches
in the tug, constitute a perpetual, effectual bar. There was one glory
of horse and another glory of mule, but no mule differed from another
mule in glory, by any palpable percentage. They had little regard for
the affinity of a somewhat common maternity. But whether rearing,
plunging, kicking, rolling in the mire or pawing at the clouds, they
were all equal. They met upon the level and parted on the square.
The war-horse of the late unpleasantness has been chiseled and painted
in many attitudes--especially that of unsupported suspension in the
atmosphere, with extended nose and carefully adjusted legs. Sheridan's
horse, propelled down the wild, disheveled turnpike by "a terrible
oath" at the rate of five (5) miles per stanza, hangs to the canvas in
a posture unnatural as that of some artillery steed swung by the
breeching from a tree after a caisson explosion. The war-horse has
been sufficiently pictured and carved. But he still lacks his literary
limner. Almost the sole description of him now accessible is that left
by the versatile Orpheus C. Kerr. There is embodied an analysis of
that celebrated Gothic steed presented to this Orpheus by his maiden
aunt and endeared to the saline affections of the mackerel brigade by
several amiable idiosyncrasies. Of whom it is written:
"The beast is fourteen hands high, fourteen hands long, and his
sagacious head is shaped like an old-fashioned pickax. Viewed from
the rear his style of architecture is Gothic, and has a gable end to
which his tail is attached. His eyes are two pearls set in mahogany,
and before he lost his sight were said to be brilliant." And more to
the same effect, intimating a diet of shoe pegs for oats and saw-dust
for millstuffs, save in the rare occasions when he could set his
inflexible teeth into a hay bale with unadulterated joy.