was good to put on potatoes. The busy editor replied that it might do
for men whose taste had been vitiated by tobacco and rum, but for his
own eating he preferred gravy. This was the cranberry tart retort of
the illustrious journalist, with a tough undercrust of misconception,
it is true. The condiments for the Army Mule's camp banquet were not
of the spice spicy. He has clear memories of a voracity which created
wide vacuum in sundry greenswards, and played havoc with corn cribs
manifold. The voracity remains, but the swards and cribs are far, far
away.
At spasmodic intervals a sympathetic warrior, having burned all the
top rails of an informally confiscated fence, will toss the juicy and
edible bottom rail to the pleading, omniverous Mule, residuary legatee
of camp-fires. This is good average food in times of internecine
strife, when so simple an article as pie is a precious prerogative.
But such well-flavored morsels are too uncertain for standard
sustenance. For shockingly protracted periods, he stands unfed,
neglected, receiving all suggestions with a squeal and a kick, while
the zephyrs disinfect his fur. Pending which, stark, grim skeletons of
all the barked and branchless trees within stretch of his tether
attest the final result of an attempt to adjust his Minnesota appetite
to his Andersonville rations. If watered twice a week he may vote
himself lucky; he has not even the surfeit of a teetotaler's wassail,
where water flows like wine. "A Mule feels chilly in July," says the
Talmud; if his temperature depends on the supply of internal fuel,
there is limited space for astonishment.
Meanwhile an unsanctified teamster, with red hair and hare-lip,
blushing with innocence until his whiskers singe in the heat, enjoys
the encampment episode to the uttermost. In Constantinople public
opinion is gauged by the prevalence of nocturnal conflagrations, and
the number of hanged bakers decorating the street corners next
morning. But in camp there is no concentrated public opinion
sufficiently intense to mete out due retribution to the profligate
castigator of the fodderless, thirsty Mule. He sleeps on ample
bedding of good sweet hay, and has large store of gerrymandered corn
to exchange for toothsome luxuries. His tobacco is of the costliest
brand and he defiantly blows the froth of numerous beers from his
blasphemous lips. He carries a full purse and a steady nerve; also a
bomb-proof conscience void of offense. Bad medicine, he!
The jocundities of life in camp we may gather _ad nauseam_ from the
romances of some of the professors of freehand drawing who enlisted as
army correspondents; but for purposes of authentic history these
narratives are worthless as second-hand champagne corks. The
jocularities referred to have no interest to the solemn, imperturbable
Mule save when he is an object of their malevolence. Then they are
more interesting than enjoyable. The swell imbecile carries an
umbrella under his arm through crowded streets until its tip is
garnished with the eye of some unfortunate fellow wayfarer; the man
who loses the eye fails to see the point of--the joke.
The Mule is not much of a joker himself; but as a victim of practical
jokes, fine, funny or chestnutty, he has become widely celebrated.
His resentment of these preposterous hilarities, all of which are on
the _passe_ social code of roller rinks, has caused much of the
reputation for waspy temper which now attaches to him with the
tenacity of a bachelor girl to the state of single blissfulness.
Temper changes with status, as was ascertained by the enthusiast who
originally named his _fiancee_ Revenge because she was sweet, but now
that she is his wife calls her Delay because she is dangerous.
The city man who would own a farm should have a good income well
assured elsewhere, for it will certainly be needed. The foolhardy
individual who proposes to play tricks on a mule should be well
buttressed with sound accident policies. Beware the irritated
quadruped! Look not into the red mouth of a wild Numidian lion; touch
not the royal Bengal tiger's remotest whisker-tip; avoid the little
black bull with an eye like a razor's edge; make no experiments with
the terminal facilities of the speechless, inscrutible Mule!
His ways are past finding out; his kicks are incalculable,
inexplicable, incomprehensible. He sometimes allows patience to pile
up in ridges on his neck, while the battalions of wrath are debouching
from all quarters into his hoof. Then the eruption breaks out with
torpedo suddenness and with an energy of fury that rivals the
deafening roar which smites the aggregated ear of the magnificent
metropolis, when fire invades the wholesale district.
Blessed is the nation whose annals are uneventful--America is safe
with fifteen million children in the public schools and three thousand
citizens to one soldier. Happy is the bride whom the sun shines on
whether matriculated at Ognotz or merely captivated at Topeka. Joyous
to the weary mechanic the picnic of his labor holiday, with its
lemonade, its orations, and its other things that lull to peaceful
slumber. Halcyon to the Army Mule are monotonous days in camp, when
they bring surcease of torment as well as toil; red-lettered if
therewithal be brought, by rare concatenation, such plethora of long
forage as drowns vicissitude in bright beatitude. In that case he
rounds out radiantly and within the cycle of a very few days develops
beyond recognition. His protrusions disappear like the vanishing lines
of a mineral lode. His rumps accumulate fat and his girth expands with
a facility that is amazing. His eye takes on a new gleam and his bray
acquires a fresh intonation.
Moreover, he is speedily transformed into a bold aristocrat. He
cultivates style and assumes airs of conscious superiority equal to
the contemptuous sniff of a Fifth avenue dog who has smelled some
chance passer-by two or three grades below par. His future may be
uncertain as a Spaniard's veracity or a Frenchman's paternity; but he
lives in the glad and glowing present, with the nonchalance of a
Russian official hunting for fragments of the czar by torchlight,
after a popular demonstration.
Of the Mule in battle, lean is the record's exploitation. There is
little danger that his renown in that line will ever be subversive of
our liberties and other luxuries. Right is forever on the scaffold,
wrong forever on the make, as of old. But the placid, benevolent Mule
never takes up arms against either party--our quartermaster's returns
of uncounted thousands "lost in action" to the contrary
notwithstanding. It even seems difficult to secure credit for such
service as he actually rendered. His occasional sporadic work in
artillery teams is wholly forgotten. His frequent spurts to the
flaming front with ammunition wagons is entirely ignored.
A common, peaceful explosion of powder magazines at home not only
shatters all the windows in the neighborhood, but also shatters the
faith of people for miles around in the doctrine of resurrection of
the body. So the peaceful nature of the Mule is fatal to any
accumulation of reputation bubbles, where bayonets bristle and
saltpeter burns. Were he ten times the tin-clad child of havoc that he
is, the florid, hare-lipped arbiter of his destinies would see to it
carefully that, barring accidents, his opportunities for responding to
long rolls should be few.
The Chicago socialists tendered an olive branch to the police made of
gas-pipe and charged with nitroglycerine in a highly persuasive state
of concentration. But when the red and riotous fume of the
bomb-throwers' breath permeated the haymarket like a pestilence, no
army Mule mingled with the medley of frowzy trousers. No more do we
hear of him at Shiloh or Champion Hill or Cedar Creek.
For offensive purposes the Mule was, in general, harmless as a United
States frigate or a divinity student at a bean-bag festival, or the
ghost of a goose, white, downy and clamorous. The valedictorian of the
last class at the Keeley cure, permeated with a variety of virtuous
joint and several resolutions, could scarcely be more docile. Even the
reproachful Confederate smokehouse could not shake its gory padlock at
the stainless, unimpeachable Mule--although he carried a jimmy equal
to most emergencies, he could, as a rule, readily establish an alibi.
When fodder is really in the shock, and frost is ready to be cleft
from pumpkins with a snow-plow, then such free tubers as have been
produced in sweet charity's name on the Pingree plan should be
harvested without procrastination; delays are perilous at that season
of the year. The evil effects of the shock, however, can be minimized,
by feeding the fodder, in advance, to the harmless, appreciative Mule.
Forewarned is four times armed, or more.
Non-combatants and impedimenta compose the rear of an army when it is
in action. Here assemble great drinkers of alcohol, and vast eaters,
who measurably justify Germany's subsequent discrimination against the
American hog--all of whom let concealment like a chinch-bug prey on
their damaged cheeks, their necks, meanwhile, being given over to the
ravages of the army flea. Here in secure serenity mobilize numerous
excellent subjects for the romantic young woman who yearns for a
lovely debauchee to reform. Here congregate cooks, commissaries and
sutlers--this last with a sage-brush tinge of disappointment in his
aspect, and a Jenness-Miller cut of trousers on his limbs. Here
recreate skulkers who simulate heroes, and sneaks in the garbage of
soldiers, all cumberers of the ground, like a prophet gone to seed in
his own country. Here gather men of Trilby feet and mighty thirst,
who are riotous with repartee, but intensely hostile to all manner of
soft beverage; also cowards, inveterate as the upward tendency of
tartar emetic; moreover, quartermasters' clerks, spouting
bloodthirstiness like a congressional candidate, or some other gas
well; likewise, here in the rear, are mule wagons, mule pack trains,
mule teams, mule drivers and Mules.
When retreating or outflanked the order is varied and rear becomes
front instanter. Then unthinkable confusion reigns. A financial
catastrophe brought on by forty-cent wheat and ten-cent statesmanship
looking at facts through a long-distance binocle, is bad enough. An
explosion of the swear tank for a thought distillery in the higher
realms of journalism is even worse, if possible. But when a Mule dam
breaks, the thundering reverberation of its tumultuous hoofs is a
resonant forecast of pandemonium rampant. Vain and futile then all
ardent aspiration for such quiet as ensues when the wicked cease from
borrowing and the female elocutionist soars and bores no more! Our
cavalry out-posts were broken doses of soothing syrup for the nervous
flanks of the infantry, and often stampeded the front line by their
too precipitate retrogression.
A stampede of Mule teams to the rear had all the _spirituel_ features
and picturesque complications of an arrangement of tariff schedules on
the principle of local option. Attempts at control were hopeless as
piloting a national campaign when the American voter is on the
rampage. It was a chaotic conglomeration of convulsive uproar,
sufficient to whirl down any hope of glory with a sickening slump. The
gentleman from out of town, who, in spite of conspicuous warning,
blows out the gas, makes his exit from sublunary strife in enviable
quietude. No such privileges are extended to the end man of a Mule
rush. In exclusive social circles, the dress may be a dream, and the
bill a nightmare, but in the mixed companionship we are contemplating,
this impromptu display is a veritable delirium tremens of undelineated
horror.
Frederick the Great shouted to a fleeing battle-straggler, "Wretch,
wouldst thou live forever?" and paralyzed him. The unabashed army
teamster, with a sliced upper lip and hair aesthetically matching his
sorrel Mule, sprinting along the broad highway of wrath, pitched
downward at an angle of forty-five degrees toward perdition, would
have admitted the soft impeachment, and pursued his flight, lashing,
blaspheming. He may have been, at home, as consistent a Baptist as
ever yoked a steer, but for this occasion all rules are suspended by
unanimous consent, and precedent tumbles headlong. The coincidence of
a florid girl and a pale horse is always exasperating, at least to the
girl; a hurried retreat in the presence of a menacing enemy, naturally
exasperates to full pitch of desperation the belligerent boss of the
nimble, obedient Mule.
In numberless miscellaneous episodes of a military sphere, the Army
Mule was marked high as to deportment. Though of somewhat irregular
character, even verging at times on the diabolical, he emulated the
standards of the officer and the gentleman. We can afford to mix a
little sentiment with our matter of fact. We can afford to drop a
tear when the object is worth it. We can afford a note of eulogy under
like circumstances, even to an Arizona cayuse fattened on bunch-grass
to the rotundity of a prickly pear.
Yes, certainly, business thrift is commendable, but when it comes to
crossing the lightning-bug with the honey-bee so that the latter can
work at night, we draw the line. Sentiment aside, there is a measure
of truth in the averment that the Army Mule and the army bean put down
the rebellion. The dancing diplomat, with his twisted comprehensions
and his addled complacencies may not appreciate it. Such an one,
having never associated with the speechless, unspeakable Mule, nor,
indeed, had any legitimate business transactions with him, may
possibly still assert that the lion is king of beasts. Far from it!
The lion will serve as a freak, children half price; but for steady
days' works, for genuine _aplomb_ and musical dexterity of wide
longitudinal range, the courteous, dignified Mule was preeminently
peerless.
To hospital and guard-house, Siamese bugbears of honorable service,
he was a stranger. It was never necessary to detail a fatigue squad to
police his ears. The worthy chaplain, fresh from green pastures of
civil life, where he fed the juicy lambs and clubbed the tough old
rams of the flock, found no occasion for reproof to the silent,
orthodox Mule.
No venial dereliction ever subjected him to stoppage of pay or
reduction to the ranks, even when the fodder that he longed for never
came. No court-martial, reeking with pungent odors of staple and fancy
sutlers' goods, ever met to arbitrate his predestinated destiny. You
might tie his tail like a pretzel, or pound his bray in a mortar, yet
would not his serenity depart from him. The proneness of his voice
apparatus to go off at half cock unfitted him for crooked works of
strategy--he could never be relied on either to "lie" in wait or
"steal" on an enemy. How gratefully he turns with a maple-sap thaw in
his aspect, when his neck has been stripped of the blistering harness;
how joyously his eager nostrils sniff the forage from afar. Oh!
grateful, melodious Mule!
A zoological riddle, offspring of amalgam and miscegen as
unclassifiable as a severe case of Debs aggravated by symptoms of
Coxey and Altgeld, he had, nevertheless too much animal self-respect
to ever incur censure for getting humanly drunk. While the giddy whirl
of current events whirls even more giddily, let us remember that
virtue in his favor.
Man's frailty darkens many a sad, sad story--sad as a volume of the
Congressional Record; the Army Mule's frailties were few, his
conquests many. He was amiable after all; even General Butler, the
most illustrious heavenly twin of war times, conceded that much. His
temper was by no means of the cactus order, generally speaking. He
chooses grudges with rare discrimination; it is always safe to suspect
the man that a Mule hates. Patient in toil; silent in suffering;
cogent and cautious as the rule in Shelly's case; serene amid direst
confusion and alarm; heedless of ancient sarcasms decaying or
petrified, he was in no sense a grumbler, and in no unpardonable sense
a kicker. His hours of feed were unstable as the advertising rates of
a poor but honest journalist, yet he was lighter of heart than a
newly married gent rushing the oil can to a corner grocery.
If to his straight enduring back a mountain howitzer was sometimes
strapped and fired without unslinging, he accepted the indignity, went
to grass with the recoil, and rose for the next inning, unruffled as
an expert witness emerging from the labyrinth of a hypothetical
question--oh! dimless, unknowable Mule!
A retired tobacconist adopted for the motto of a fresh coat of arms to
be emblazoned on his carriage panels: "_Quid Rides?_" Why do you
laugh? After a Saint Petersburg assassination episode it is
comparatively immaterial whether you call the widow czarina or
imperatritza. In these peaceful days, Lincoln's speech at Gettysburg,
translated into the jingling speech of Chinamen, and even into the
jabbering Japanese, which rivals the contortions of the kinetoscope,
opens a new evangel to their narcotic, Oriental souls. Sherman's
marvelous retreat from Atlanta to Savannah is studied by the
strategists of deepest Afgahnistan; alleged busts of John A. Logan
are worshiped as idols in innermost Kamchatka, and spicy narratives we
told to credulous marines are the basis of classic fiction on the
Congo.
Hence nothing is frivolous that lends an added array to the most
luminous chapter of contemporary history--of any history. While in the
matter of beer, the foreigner unquestionably pays the tax, or most of
it, yet as between natives, white-colored may lose and black may win;
'tis hard to tell. Make no mistake as to the intrinsic, historic
importance of the forgotten, unforgetting Mule!
The empty skeptic may come forth with fire in his eye and boiled egg
on his whiskers seeking to overwhelm us with the gorgeousness of his
gush or the sumptuousness of his gall. To empty skeptics, or shallow
scoffers, these simple annals of a lowly career may seem fruitless as
that famous sour apple tree that failed to yield its promised harvest;
hopeless as the perpetual revolutions of a bob-tailed dog chasing the
vacant space where the tail should be; tasteless as fried smelts;
thankless as opening a mint sauce to the free coinage of lamb. The
chappie fellows who flutter at functions and titter at teas may scoff
or scorn. But the eye of calm philosophy ought to beam kindly on a
faithful effort to weave unconsidered trifles of truth into a wreath
of earned, though meager and belated justice, so that even the
wayfaring man, though full, need score no errors.
The speechless, unquenchable Mule was a real factor in those events we
love to commemorate. It is asserted that only one man now survives who
helped whip Lee at Gettysburg, and then marched triumphantly with
Grant into conquered Vicksburg next day. But the Army Mule did both,
and more! He went out with the mob of pinfeather volunteers, who spent
their first callow days principally in vociferous "swearing in," and
their sappy nights at discordant drills in patriotic minstrelsy.
With less recognition than even the barnstormers' encore of addled
carrot and frumescent cabbage, he helped wet-nurse our infant
regiments when they were just getting able to sit up and gaze vacantly
around. With a prodigious faculty in his heels for putting strange
faces in heaven, he held himself in commendable subjection while
incipient legions evolved themselves out of chaos. He passed on,
beaten with many stripes, to that multitudinous aggregation called an
army, where human atoms, swarming and wriggling to the music of brass
bands, like agile mites in a nugget of archaic cheese, united to give
him the frigid shake with a glad hand. The girl, photographed for her
lover with her vail down, that his sister might not recognize the
likeness, was a miracle of modest artifice; thrice proficient in
meritorious cunning, the unassuming, artful Mule.
Unequally yoked in servitude to a cowboy taskmaster, unlovable as the
venerable Smallweed's brimstone, blackbeetle helpmeet, also redheaded,
hare-lipped and stuffed with nitric nine-cornered blasphemy, he plodded
painfully on. Stark and indurate like an Adirondack meadow enameled
with trap rock, he plodded rigidly on. Anhungered and athirst, with no
credit at the sutler's, on he plodded, through hot, white clouds of
drastic turnpike dust, or red and hideous depths of gummy mud,
dragging incredible burdens of those indispensable supplies that
smooth war's wrinkled front and quell its clamoring emptiness. When he
diffidently claimed his share of such supplies, he was given the
marble heart or the dry and dreadful laugh--yea, the juiceless,
mechanical laugh, with daggers in it.
Oh! liberty, what humbugs are nurtured in thy name! Prodded and flayed
until his staggering knees, his welt-fretted haunches and his bloody
nostrils placarded his agony, the Army Mule accepted the wideopen
policy of his castigator and crunched his barmecide feasts, lacerated
and scarified, hoping the brighter day.
Like the intoxicating bewilderment of a reception ball, decorated with
roses, lilies, smilax, palms and electric illumination, come back to
us those grateful reminiscences, crowded with apparitions of the
maligned, mellifluous Mule. Leashed and shackled, foodless in the
drizzly, sleety camp, when our quarrel with destiny was an octave
higher than usual, his cheerful night cries, welcome as suicides to a
coroner, exorcised the blue devils of our dolorous solitude.
While fumes of our priceless coffee floated pleasantly pungent like
the cedar aroma of a moth closet, the tuneful echoes of those night
cries floated also--Mule answering unto Mule in fond, fraternal
recognition. Baptized with fire, adjacent or remote, even if only with
its rumors and reflections, the pattering skirmish shots of distant
action, he at length became a veritable veteran. Like a
thrice-rejected suitor finally made happy, he had been well shaken
before taken. And now, a warrior bold, seasoned to war's alarms, he
could, upon occasion, thirst or seem to thirst for gore, with all the
mad ferocity of a sheep smitten with hydrophobia, or a camel charged
with nitroglycerine. Duplicating the awkwardness of man's debut into
polite society delayed until past the meridian of life, this ardor of
the mettled, military Mule, if late, was touchingly conspicuous.
Marching triumphant home, kneesprung but irrepressible, his large,
luxuriant ears were tremulous with the hysterical emotions of the
hour, and his double-turreted voice was loudest in the wild acclaim of
victory. Long years he lived, it may be, wearing on knightly shoulder
a proud insignia of his service, the indellible brand of honor, which
no humility of avocation could degrade nor purse-proud aristocracy of
money bags, the basest known on earth, contemn with impunity. And when
the end comes, as come it must, even to the longevous Mule, then
speechless and unspeakable at last and eternally, the flag under which
he toiled might be put to worse uses than that of covering his
emaciated frame as it is trundled off to the glue-factory.
I mean no disrespect to the flag.
* * * * *