crime may be debarred admission to war cycloramas be condemned to
surfeit their hunger for knowledge as to the conflict's equestrian
features with job lots of descriptive pinxit like this? Is the war
charger to be cut off thus with no extra allowance for training or
pedigree? Are nice distinctions of gait, between the singlefoot trot
and the rack, which are manifestly matters of original brain power and
painful culture, modified of course by heredity, to be studiously
ignored? In short, is the horse to be thus dismissed into obliquity,
so to speak? If so, what conclusions will posterity deduce as to the
anatomical development of the speechless inferior Mule? If an animal
of fair social position and tenacious of his rank is to be thus
lightly disposed of, what can we claim for one of no rank whatever,
with only the snap of his teeth and the whisk of his tail to attract
attention? The case is critical.
When the kicker in politics dies he stays dead a long time; when an
opportunity passes it may never recur. Opportunities for writing
correct history are slipping by month after month, year after year.
The aged, surviving Mule gets nervous as in the teething period of his
suffering colthood, while our expert historians move off toward the
horizon, clothed in linen ulsters and vain regrets. We have essays
galore on the immorality of trotting and the iniquity of pools. We
have treatises enough on overhead check reins and the cruelty of the
cable slot. But this is a condition, not a theory, which now
reproaches us. Soon it will be too late. If the agitation started here
shall finally result in loosening some corset strings of prejudice and
fixing the neglected, necessary Mule in his true orbit, all will be
well. The opportunities of a grateful country for upholstering his
stomach with the finest and greenest her pastures proffer, will soon
be gone forever. If we can now succeed in calculating his right
ascension and declination, and stamping him on the chart indelibly, we
may pass from recreation to refreshment in full assurance of a duty
well performed.
Then let us agitate! The winner of the sinful and expensive Derby must
not forever flaunt his exclusive title to consideration. The piebald
circus favorite shall no longer monopolize the fondness of our rising
youth. The praiseworthy Mule, hot and foamy perhaps, stung with
gad-flies, thirsty, dusty and cross, but patriotic and persevering
amid all, shall have his long delayed due.
The soldier Mule is in harness, fated to accomplish marvels in the
sweet ultimate, if his longevity holds out; his neo-pagan steersman,
with hare-lip, a hepatized conscience, a peroxide complexion and a
solitaire front tooth cut bias, is in the saddle; all being thus in
readiness the war can now begin. If the speechless miserable Mule
shall unfortunately escape sorosis of the heart, hermitage of the
lungs, and percolation by germicide decoctions, so as to live long
enough, he will become a veteran. But that is anticipation. The near,
dear day will arrive soon enough--alas!
Harnessed and mounted, cursed, cudgeled and spurred he starts on his
weary pilgrimage. His emotions are more complex and profound than
those with which a young woman receives her first information that
there are spring styles in trousers as well as in gowns. For him no
primrose paths of dalliance open beckoning; they fade incoherently
into the dim bedraggled, with no stretch of white satin ribbons to
restrain feminine curiosity.
He travels from Ohio to the gulf, but not in a palace car nor on a
deadhead ticket. Far otherwise. He goes out for an extended starring
tour in the provinces and assists in presenting a magnificent drama,
but only evokes volleys of powerful and prolonged hisses from the guys
of the gallery. He brings up the rear of the most gigantic and
jubilant salvation army since salvation was revealed, but he is not
conceited. He is full of suppressed merit as an egg is of omelet, yet
bashful as the kerchiefless caller who toys with the doily in nervous
embarrassment while the seconds swell into centuries. He officiates in
the conveyance of breadstuffs, otherwise hard-tack, mouldy and
fungous, left over from the Mexican war, and fit only for slumgullion;
of meats with the odor of a sewer-gas eruption; of black molasses, a
sulphuret of glucose, sour as the tartrate of acrimony.
Also desiccated sundries obsolete as a rutabaga turnip, class of '56,
or a weather guess from an anti-bilious almanac for '49, or the
lottery wheel of a fair fakir in the early thirties. Likewise
commissary whisky, vintage of lye, lime and fusel; decanted of all
disgusts; confected for the scum of slums. But none of these have
terror or temptation for him; he knoweth his master's feed box. A
brave, bright, meritorious Mule is he, with a spring in his heel and
healing in his springs.
He blots himself out of the green landscape of his youth, the
asphodel meadows of peace that lie athwart the rustic tavern with its
soft soap, communistic towel and brown sugar. He marches on, marshaled
in double column closed in mass, to slaughters that will all the
multitudinous creeks incarnadine, and fears not. He steps forth with
countenance severe as that of the sterilized milk speculator whose
investment has soured, but heart warm as the modest, efficacious
fritter, dear to the breakfast relish of Hoosier schoolboys when the
frost is on the melon and the fodder's in the stalk. He starts out in
the morning eager as if something of great value were hanging just in
front of him, with a town supervisor reaching for it and a creditor's
meeting in the annex; he trudges along all day with the testy and
sub-acid humor of a Pullman conductor, softened by a thousand
patriotic reflections; he comes in at night on right by file into
line, crisp and beautiful as a sarsaparilla lithograph.
Toil has no fears; he does not care a cigarette for it. After the long
day's exertion, with no nutriment but raw fog for breakfast and
roasted south wind for dinner, with no encouragement but polyglot
epithets from a hare-lipped miracle of mendacity, and frequent
usufruct of hissing whip-lash to his quaking flanks and skinned sides,
he does not despair. One is foolish to waste time trying to throw five
aces with four dice, and the usual rustic system of studying games of
hazard has similar elements of weakness; but there is no weakness
about the character of the seasoned, unchangeable Mule. If a glossary
of battles could be transcribed from the quartermasters' reports of
"actions" where Mules were lost, it would make a fearful and wonderful
record. But no premonitions of battle trouble him now. With a good
hearty roll in the dust and its diatonic accompaniment of snorts,
groans and grunts, he rises refreshed. Then he kicks a few times for
practice with the agility of an antiquated drum-stick from the black
crook ballet, and lies down to rest, supperless but happy. All the
visible universe is action and motion, from the slow dissolving
mountain of granite, to the fleeting, flitting cloud of vapor that
scuds across the sky.
But the Mule sleeps, noiseless and motionless. Into that steep, deep
sleep what dreams might creep! But no! No visions of to-morrow's big
load and high check now vex his royal ribs. No colic phantoms disturb
his illusion of combing his fetlocks in golden stubble--fit function
for his underrated merits. No nightmares come hurling cold hailstones
at his sinless head or murdering "Sweet Marie" in Z minor around his
protesting ears. So he awakens invigorated and steps out into the
purple dawn of next day, fresh as the cold oaken bucket that dangles
no longer in the moss-covered well, and chipper as Sancho Panza's
Dapple--oh! speechless, incredible Mule!
Were not comparisons odious we might unreservedly affirm that he was
fully capable of the zeal displayed by one of our major-generals who,
on or about August 29, 1862, rushed toward the sound of John Pope's
cannon at a hold-the-fort-for-I-am-coming velocity of six miles a day.
We may furthermore safely claim for him devotion at least equal to
that displayed by another major-general, coincidently negatively
pregnant, who drank from the same canteen and simultaneously
telegraphed to Pope from Alexandria, proposing to reinforce him with
every wagon in camp if he would send back cavalry for an escort!
There is a period in every battle when the bravest soldier would
donate liberally to the missionary cause for trustworthy assurance of
scathless emergence. The most valorous among us are at times
conciliatory and pacific as an intimidated husband just emerging from
a domestic cyclone cellar. Human nature is not perpetually keyed up to
the Marco Bozarris pitch. Marvel not then that the astute Lincoln,
when informed that a general and forty Mules had been captured by the
enemy, put on that far-away, lodge-of-sorrow look and plaintively
remarked: "I am sorry to lose the Mules." Generals, brave to the point
of recklessness and beyond it, could be made as easily as bonanza
Christians, who join the church by typewriter and are baptized by
telegraph--but Mules had a specific, ascertainable value.
The Army Mule's market value or cost to the government ranged from
one hundred and fifteen to one hundred and fifty dollars. This price
was established when he was first brought in and exhibited to all
intents and purposes as an article of merchandise. He was then largely
occupied in attempting to conceal exclusive knowledge of certain
secluded green pastures; winking slyly to himself in the excess of his
cunning, all unaware of the multiplex miseries stored away for him in
the immediate future. The price was generally satisfactory, for the
service sighed for him. But the Mule did not receive the money. Far
from it! A part of it went to his loyal owner, so called. We all knew
him. He was suave as a Scotchman who has adopted the manners and
customs of civilization. He was cheerful as the radiant old circuit
rider who preaches to a mixed congregation in a boom suburb, from a
text found in lot 3, block 12, of Timothy's second subdivision. In
every crisis he was first to stay at home and readiest to volunteer
his moral support in putting down insurrection.
After selling a string of Mules he would walk the streets for a week
filled with rum and gladness, bragging in his balmy periods over the
keenness of his sharpness. The remainder of the purchase price, as was
currently suspected, went into the pockets of the purchasing
quartermaster, clothed in white samite, mystic, plunderful--popular
only within restricted areas. None of it went to the Mule. A woman
never looks well in a fault-finding habit; a man never looks well when
detected in prevarication; therefore let us tell the truth: None of it
went to the Mule!
Parenthetically we may remark that this type of financial injustice
has been perpetuated, until the hind quarters of the speechless,
unspeakable survivors would be excusable for rising in their might to
protest emphatically. If the shoe fits spike it, says the farrier; if
the conscience twinges one or more of us here present, it is perhaps
not yet too late to reform. Nearly a thousand men, mostly teamsters,
buglers and hospital stewarts, toothless but terrible, have been
pensioned since the war for lameness caused by the kick of a Mule's
hoof iron, while no Mule has been pensioned for lameness, spavin,
ring-bone, wind-gall or glanders--no, not one. The speechless,
rheumatic Mule, in all his army moods and tenses, acquired no
stiffness of the joints materially differing from the old
civil-service, barnyard variety.
Why then differentiate? Punched by the wagon-tongue or tripped by the
trace chains, when the breeching was fractured on a down grade, the
exposures to rupture or fracture were incessant, with no experts in
attendance to splice the splints. These are facts which no profuseness
of classic allusion to pearly brooks and flowery meads can obscure,
when the sour cream of his experience curdles in his soul. In gushing
eras of reconciliation large populations seemed extremely bent on
pushing things to the whimpering point; the people who were wrong were
with surprising unanimity almost ready to forgive the people who were
right and kiss again with cheers.
In those days the widow of Stonewall Jackson was gallantly escorted
through Boston Common by General Benjamin F. Butler, Governor of
Massachusetts. And she proclaimed with tears in her voice and
patriotism in her heart, that she found in this star-eyed hero an
elegant gentleman as well as an orthodox believer--then immediately
applied for a patent on her discovery. (Some men, like happy dreams,
are too good to be true). Surely the day of jubilee had come. But even
at that time undying animosities and misconceptions prevented an award
of due credit to the crippled, superannuated Army Mules. Little wonder
that so ungrateful an epoch was mostly given over to hybridizing
chrysanthemums and breeding chappies.
And the end is not yet. "Loyal" owners, seedy and snuffy, are still
collecting exaggerated pay from a long enduring government for
unnumbered myriads of mythical Mules alleged to have been confiscated.
The bronzed Kickapoo matron with soiled fingers, straining maple syrup
through the family heirloom blanket for the St. Louis market in the
forests of southern Iowa, has almost ceased to be a picturesque,
typical feature of our civilization. But the war claimant still
lingers, multiplying his lost Mules periodically, as the years glide
by,--while the just claims of the unquestionably loyal Mule himself
are neglected with studious shamelessness. Many persons are said to
think that this is not just, but we may perhaps be pardoned for the
remark that it is a long time between thinks.
Take notice, however, that not all Mules can establish unquestioned
loyalty. Some of them yielded to the strain on their principles and
went over to the enemy, like a rural dupe who is so charmed with the
accomplishments of the shell-game adept that he resolves to embark in
that line of business himself. Loyalty and treason were largely
matters of education and environment. Even the rival little liver
pills are quite the same in their essential, fundamental ingredients;
one is aloes, rhubarb and antimony, while the other is antimony, aloes
and rhubarb; either is equally offensive to a refined and cultured
mucous membrane, and both are warranted to go through by moonlight,
errors and omissions excepted.
A veracious war writer has recorded that in May, 1865, the Confederate
army consisted of Kirby Smith, four Mules and a base drum, moving
rapidly toward Texas. The general's proudest hope then was that he
might be allowed to eke out his future anonymous existence in the
solitudes of Mexico; the chattels were joint and several assets, like
a plug of tobacco in the hands of a threshing crew. In war the
defeated faction must accept the quartermaster's brand, "Inspected and
Condemned," without a murmur, even as in politics he is four times
disarmed who lets his barrel burst. These bonnie blue Mules could be
readily classed as disfranchised and denationalized. They would
clearly come within the fourteenth amendment unless they have been
amnestied by the statute of limitations.
At any rate, the vivid historic pageant ranks next in interest to Saul
of Tarsus riding the Mule's father into Damascus, where he proceeded
to mulch the nursery stock of a new faith and dig a few grubs out of
the roots. The boy with a big apple in his mouth, that he can neither
spit out nor chew nor swallow, is a distressing spectacle; the
twentieth century southerner apologizing for his deluded secessionist
ancestor will command a broad clientage of respectful sympathy.
The Army Mule's strategic value was recognized throughout the whole
corrugated surface of the Kenesaw region, and everywhere else within
the lines of active operation. It was tersely expressed by General
George H. Thomas when he said: "The fate of an army sometimes depends
on a linch-pin." Poetry without a motif is held by experts to be
deficient in verve; an army without a train long as the exordium of a
professional spell-binder was supposed to be impossible. The science
of electrocution is in its infancy, but the death-dealing corset has
been industriously slaughterous for three or four generations.
Erroneous solutions of the transportation problem are responsible for
much needless sacrifice of life and treasure. The army train was a
baffling understudy. Six patient, faithful Mules were attached to each
creaking big blue wagon, with a high, white canvas cover. Thirteen
wagons were, during the first two years of the war, allotted to a
regiment of infantry; six to a battery of artillery. Such campaigning
emulated the luxuriousness of a hundred-acre corn-field where every
ear-muff is made of silk. (P. S. It was subsequently abandoned.) One
hundred teams occupy a mile of road. Thus an army of seventy-five
thousand men are followed when marching by a wagon-train eighteen
miles long, hauled by Mules.
A broken linch-pin or king-bolt or hame-strap near the front of this
lumbering procession would bring the whole succedent line promptly to
a halt. Strategy at once impinges against a nonplus. The campaign
comes to a dead stand with a dull thud. The florid, inductive
teamster, with a hare-lip, is pondering profoundly the subjectiveness
of dinnerlessness. He is a hectic, hungry, hairy man, with whiskers on
his wrists; in addition he is deliberate. He repairs the damage very
deliberately. He refreshes himself, meanwhile, with snatches of
ancient melody, rescued from the deluge with Shem and Ham. Also with
frequent volleys of Enfield curses and Gatling blows, discharged at
his speechless, unoffending Mules. Luridity of impiety is a _sine qua
non_.
The mild, ethereal wickedness of that fossilized beechnut relating to
the dam by a mill site, pales its ineffective glow. It is usually the
dictate of wisdom to leave a wild-eyed cannibal in undisturbed
possession of his warpath; equally so to be very sparing of sneers at
another man's joss. Consequently the driver's amiable diversion is
seldom interfered with. When all damages are repaired the procession
moves on.
Then begins again the long lumbering creak, to continue in melancholy
monotony until another linch-pin breaks or buckle parts asunder.
Eighteen miles of tortured wagons roll on and on; white-arched,
weighty; relics of a thorny, stormy past, yet pregnant with an
illimitable future. They bristle with tent-poles, trail tangled tent
ropes far behind, and exude knapsacks, haversacks, canteens, drums and
drum majors at every pore. They are festooned around and beneath with
clinging mess pans, pendulous camp kettles, and the like
differentiation of iron-mongery. If the weather is fine this creak and
grind and rumble goes on and on, with monotonous, mechanical
steadiness, subject to accidents as aforesaid, until the tuneful,
sagacious Mule sings the long roll, as he instinctively scents
approach to the preordained place of encampment, when welcome night
draws nigh.
This is the poetry of transportation, jolly as a cake-walk,
comfortable as a smoking jacket, easy as reducing the labor question
to an exact science by the acceptance of a generous salary as walking
delegate. But when rains descend and floods come, the scenery shifts;
wagons, muleteers and quadrupeds are indiscriminately plunged into
diluvial quagmires, fathomless as air and shoreless as the
gulf-stream. Then the liquified turnpike spreads over the valleys and
yellow cascades roar down the defenseless ruts.
Then the climax of helpless wretchedness arrives, always fatefully
tumbling on the articulated anatomy of a hapless, cadaverous Mule.
Beneath him even chilled-steel agony can not go. He gathers in all its
multiplex horrors, computed on the Utah plural family plan. He
would win a Columbian Exposition medal for the most picturesque
collection of miseries--picturesque, variegated and altogether
astonishing. They overwhelm him like a bather submerged in sea waves
twenty feet high, each weighing a thousand tons, half brine and half
sledge-hammer.
[Illustration: _The quenchless, marvelous mule emerges from the mire
and clay, with a whooping-cough wheeze_]
No man can adequately realize what magnificent folly he is capable of
until he sees his own old love-letters set forth in the cold, cruel
print of some hideous newspaper. No man can fully appreciate the
faithfulness of our devoted animal co-workers until he sees a crucial
test applied. The quenchless, marvelous Mule emerges from the mire and
clay, with a whooping-cough wheeze, driven to preternatural exertions
by redoubled curses and quadrupled scourgings.
His step is quick, short and grasping. The spirit inherited from some
remote Hambletonian antetype flames in his nostrils. He rings a fire
alarm, hoists the grand hailing sign of distress, and defiantly dashes
his toe-calks through to hard pan. He rushes down the high bluff,
over the muddy flat, across the cold stream, up the steep
bank--lashed, lathered and spurred. With a whisk of his tail that
scatters bullets of mud he springs to the tremendous task. His body is
squat to the earth at times, but his ears always point starward. Every
muscle hisses with the heat of the strain and every nerve is burning;
his whole frame quivers and smokes as he bursts into supremest effort
and brings his freightage to the goal, or dies in his tracks, a
speechless, unsung martyr to the cause. No burial, no monument, no
obituary.
To the Army Mule in camp, if anywhere, rest, rations and felicity
should come. A surplus of excitement is injurious to the nerves, but
life wholly without an atmosphere is in peril from suffocation. Rest
is alleged to be the only unfailing antidote to Dr. Bright's widely
advertised kidney complaint. Camp is recreation in army service as
courting is the play spell of the soul. The farmers in politics,
dedicated to a maximum of talk and a minimum of toil, need no
proclamation from the governor bidding them hold a fast from work in
order to enjoy a feast of discussion.
The free-lunch rounder, with pretzel crumbs on his mustache, loves
above all things to sit easy at his inn. Even the emancipated lady
prays earnestly for deliverance from the fatigues of the conservative,
innocent, purely platonic schottische. Consequently no blame can
justly attach to the worn and worried Mule for standing ever in
readiness to fall in with propositions for honorable repose. Beautiful
are his anticipations of a good time in camp; beautiful as a statue of
hammered brass, and as hollow. The hollowness results from the fact
that no reckoning was made of the hare-lipped despot at the other end
of the picket rope.
Ten pounds of grain and thirty pounds of hay is the daily allowance.
Some pie-plant professor of an agricultural institute, with a
marked-down set of artificial eyebrows hung at oblique angles to his
nose, long ago figured it out on strict mathematical principles of
animal economy. The court records it and the law doth give it. Thrice
happy is the beast that gets it; happy, but rarer than Indians with
side whiskers and ideality. Straw, stalks, tent pins and cracker boxes
are his more reliable provender. These are reinforced with stray bites
now and then, when he can chew himself loose, from a private's
laundered and lively underwear drying on a limb, or from the cold
shoulder of a corporal of the guard.
In the sweet, serene night watches, when slumber's chain had manacled
us, roving Mules may have rubbed noses while hatching a bleak and dark
conspiracy to massacre the brigade and plunder the forage train. But
it came to naught; possibly for lack of leadership. There was no
relief for the oppressed, defrauded Mule. No satiating food for him,
savory as Lyonaise potato softly tinctured with onion. No lollipop
confectionery for him, melting in the mouth like painted butter. Empty
is the nosebag, even as to plebeian oats; empty as the wit of
irreverent soldiers who josh the chaplain and gibe at the Mule.