bannered blazonries the symbol of a sovereign power. Everywhere and in
all times some emblem of a might which confessed no mightier has led
embattled hosts to triumph, and taught heroic spirits how sweet it is
to die. The banner becomes the crystallization of the nation's life,
and the embodiment of her glory, until fighting beneath it is
patriotism, dying for it is immortality, and treachery to it is the
blackest of crimes. Our flag of beauty and renown, descending to us
from stainless sires by a shining pathway, pure as that down which the
holy grail slipped from the opening heavens, won a new lustre in the
hands of our generation. Overlapping each other in the crowding
profusion of their golden legends, every stripe of our banner is
weighty with its battle roll, even as each silver star burns the prime
jewel in a crown of valorous achievement.
Donelson and Shiloh and Vicksburg; Nashville, and Murfreesboro, and
Kenesaw; Winchester and South Mountain and Antietam; Gettysburg and
the Wilderness and Appomatox--these and five hundred more. How the
deathless names gild the resplendent folds of the proud ensign of
liberty! Flag of the continent, rivers and seas; flag of a reunited
country; flag of the glorious past and of the dimless future; flag of
freedom; flag of the world!
Washed in the blood of the brave and the blooming,
Snatched from the altars of insolent foes;
Burning with star-fires, but never consuming,
Flash its broad ribbons of lily and rose.
Let us never cease to cherish the remembrance of the days when we
followed it and fought for it. Among the soft, delicious echoes of
those days which float booming across the ocean of memory will
sometimes come, whether we greet it kindly or coldly, a sunny
recollection of the seductive wink, the tuneful bray and the electric
kick of the Army Mule.
THE SUTLER
II
Now the time has arrived when this matter of the Sutler should be
brought into its true alignment. His status should be differentiated
and embalmed in due longitudinal sections of small pica. It should be
finally settled whether he was the reincarnation of a seventeen-year
locust, or only a pansy blossom, with lips all mute like a thinking
star in the back row of a ballet. An excess of incertitude also
prevails as to his rank and historic area. This latter at least should
be staked out and cross-sectioned for the annals that portray scenes
when heroes' heels were on the shore of Maryland, my Maryland; which
annals are expected to go shimmering down festive centuries clothed in
the perennial freshness of St. Shamrock's day in the morning.
The Sutler was born, not made. That is to say, his tendencies were
ingrained, perhaps hereditary, even in cases where his selection was
nepotic or accidental. Once he was purer than beautiful snow, it may
be, but even then he was a Sutler in embryo. And when the beautiful
snow was gone; when gentle spring had sprung and the croak of the
crocus was heard in the land; when the premature robin, wearing a sore
throat and lung-pads, came with hoarse notes whistling of peace when
there was no peace, because Sumter had surrendered--then Sutlers
blossomed out with the peach trees, to bear miscellaneous fruitage
later on.
Army service gave technical nomenclature to many familiar avocations
and characteristics. Smoked halibut by any other designation would be
a thirst-provoker just the same. But some of these military titles
were very effective disguises. The ecclesiastical monitor, from spur
to plume a star of sanctimony, was called the chaplain. The
pharmaceutical tenderloin, with a razor edge to his voice at sick-call
ceremonies, was called a surgeon. The district messenger boy was
called an adjutant, and could upon occasion play a notable poker game
with the able assistance of his sleeve. The hearse thronged with
blood-curdling Lady Macbeth suggestions was called an ambulance, and
its driver, sure of dry lodgings, ranged high up in the Four Hundred.
The speechless indispensable instrument of transportation, which
performed most of the work and received none of the pay or glory, was
called a mule, with various picturesque prefixes. The sergeant-major,
noted for vast acrobatic ability and imposing length of leg, was
called--everywhere. The colonel was often called a ---- fool; the
quartermaster was usually called a ---- rascal; and the real rascal
was sometimes known as the Sutler. The blanks represent profanity,
which I abhor.
Before those subsequent halcyon days when it had been demonstrated by
experience that the beneficent and plenteous sweet potato supplied
the precise nutritive elements best calculated to evolve serene
contentment and epicurean bliss; while yet each soldier was a voluble
and self-satisfied critic of tactics, strategy, logistics, finance and
diplomacy--then a Sutler's supplies were deemed absolutely essential
to the successful prosecution of war. But even then a measurable
discernment prevailed. Positive subtle, comparative and superlative
Sutler, was an acceptable etymologic formula in many varieties of
North American broken English. That was a period famous for the wild
coinage of phraseological vacuums into available linguistic currency,
and for the mad massacre of innocent idioms. If this formula is
incorrect it should be promptly amended by some of the back-easty
opinion architects who now lead public sentiment with a stub-pointed
pen, in long-distance controversies with hired prevaricators of a
capitalistic press out in Idaho, such as write their articles on birch
bark and wear a coat only on legal holidays. We can not always trust
the future, especially at our age. Corrections should be made
now--the able editors need not all speak simultaneously.
The Sutler kept, or at least tried to keep, alleged articles of virtu
for sale to the "boys," so-called, meaning the soldiers. With warm
hearts, cold feet, flexible stomachs, bashful consciences, and a
perpetual feeling of weariness in the mouth, these "boys" constantly
environed him from zenith to nadir and return. Selling was hard as
teaching silver-tongued statesmen that cleanliness and godliness are
contiguous. Keeping was harder than selling, and getting pay was
hardest of all. Thus beset with hardships his lot rivaled in
cheerlessness that of the scratcher in politics, with a wasp-waisted
brain, a protuberant rectitude, a self-lubricating egotism, and
exactly the minimum of soul that serves in lieu of salt to save his
carcass from decay. What with shortage and leakage and stealage by
pretended friends, often self-convicted like a young man with an
indentation of corset steel in his cuffs, on the one hand, and
imminent risk of capture by an alert enemy on the other hand, the
Sutler's stock in trade was rather more uncertain than the salivary
aim of a sociable Virginian.
The causes, incidents and results of the war in which he was a
stockholder with personal liability, though not a managing director,
were momentous to him as to all mankind, including such as still gnash
their teeth over him and revile his memory. It was a turning point in
the progress of a race; the culmination of a long series of political
events; the breaking down of an extended line of political compromises
futile as an attempt to combine finance with faro; the upheaval of a
mountainous aggregation of suppressed political forces; the explosion
of a mighty reservoir of hidden political combustibles; and in its
attendant events, as well as its remote consequences, it was as
tremendous a revolution as any which freights the records of human
destiny. This must be remembered to the Sutler's credit as he drifts
off into the subsequently.
It was a vast army. Why, its brass buttons alone weighed over a
thousand tons! No Sutler was ever drafted into that army. Hence no
Sutler ever hired a substitute and afterward suffered reproach for
failure to weave immortelles around his sarcophagus. He could not wait
for the draft; the last thing he desired was a substitute. He wanted
to go himself. He volunteered early and often, with visible alacrity
and enthusiasm. He frequently tumbled over himself in his eagerness to
move the previous question, and blasphemed his own folly with
plunging-shot fierceness a little later. As the aborigine exchangeth
wampum for small-pox, silk hat and delirium tremens, so the sanguine
Sutler often parted with peace of mind for very inadequate
consideration. Rosy were his dreams of rolling, gloating wealth; cruel
his awakening to the paralyzing verity. Frailty, thy name is fortune!
Only an expert can distinguish between an asset and a liability.
Acquit him in advance of hypocrisy and thus clarify the record. Money
was his avowed objective, the richly upholstered goal of his
solicitude,--money, even if merely accumulated for division among the
lawyers retained to break a will, as too frequently eventuates. For
him one crowded shower of glorious gold was worth a whole aurora
borealis of golden glory, earned at thirteen dollars a month and half
rations. Others might fight battles or write ballads for his country;
he was content to peddle its "Thomas and Jeremiah" fluid in flat tin
cans, surreptitious, villainous, and expensive. Others might stand
like Sheridan at Stone's river, holding his division amidst a cyclone
of shotted flame; he only asked a front seat at the paytable. Others
might manage the finances of a nation and temper wind to shorn shams;
he only petitioned that Sutler's checks be made full legal tender in
his military division. Others might yearn or pretend to yearn for
bleeding wounds and storied busts; sufficient unto him was two hundred
per cent. profit on cove oysters of antiquity. Like a fashionable
belle, his heart was always in the right place--the market place.
Honor and fame from no such conditions rise.
Pardonable then was his wrath when edibles and potables disappeared
unpaid for into parts unknown save to the Latin tongue, whence they
could be recovered only by the gentle persuasion of a stomach pump.
Thus the yellow coinage of his rapt preliminary visions faded
incomprehensibly into nothingness. Thus he emulated the survivors of a
cholera epidemic who only hear in happy dreams the footsteps of
return. Give him air! He had cause for chagrin equal to that of the
Senegambian colony with a new coon in town and no heat hot enough to
roast a 'possum. He had a right to grow apoplectic with fury and
devastate the camp like a commercial maelstrom or a political
avalanche. He righteously resented; he piously protested. He were a
craven else, and the heir and ancestor of cravens. Do you laugh at
him? So did Sarah laugh at the angels, but they laughed last.
That the Sutler's gallantry in action was specially exemplified in a
"charge," is a chestnut bald and hoary with unchallenged longevity. It
is one of those remarks that vegetate through a sequence of drowsy
centuries, to reappear during each spring season of chronology with a
masterful reach that brushes cobwebs from the skies and topples
chimneys down. Representative war-humorists who ride astride the
whistling winds, spurting effluent sluices of word-wash, and typical
war orators sorely afflicted with engorgement of vocabulary, combine
to exploit this moldy scintillation, joint product of brain sweat and
elbow unguent. They talk through their chapeaux. Every man is a
quotation from his forefathers. Every pun is a quotation from
paleocrystic cerebration. As vinegar to the teeth and smoke to the
eyes, so is misprint witticism to the properly instructed
intelligence. It is wicked to laugh at a bishop; it is criminal to
laugh at jokeless jocularity. He who can separate eloquence from the
gastric gases and distinguish between the sharps and flats of
_facetiae_, suppressing his intellectual impatience at the unbridled
linguistic solecism, may pertinently ask: Wherefore not? To charge was
human, but to collect was sublime; always difficult, often impossible.
The credit a Sutler was obliged to give was often as long as a plea in
chancery. He was the old man not afraid of eternity; and the
prospective extended term of payment, if happily payment should ever
come at all, was a prime element in adjusting margins of profit. His
sole competitor in this line of making a charge is said to be the
modern plumber--he of the slow step and quick respiration redolent of
raw onions--he of the small tenderness and large bill. But that is a
chestnut musty as the other. Boycott both of them! Only a man of most
stomachful and gunpowder instincts, a warrior and a blood-quaffer from
aforetime, could long survive the rueful infliction of either.
Although war without a Sutler would have been a barren ideality, worse
than politics without the negro, or the free coiner, or the
prohibitionist not taxed, yet even with him there was a not infrequent
flaw in its felicities. The fact may even at this late day be duly
verified by numerous surviving old soldiers, that when he was wanted
he was seldom there, and when he was there he seldom had what was
wanted. Milk for babes; skim milk for pigs and calves; buttermilk for
dyspeptic opulence. Beverages more pungent, searching and responsive
were in demand at the Sutler's tent. He trafficked within complex
circumscriptions; always threatened with craft and rapacity; always
perspiring with fear like the marble statues in Rome at the approach
of Hannibal; always liable to be welcomed with bloody hands to an
inhospitable calamity. No country cross-roads grocer's assortment was
his, reeking with pestiferous perfume of salt fish and sauerkraut;
filling the air with a duchess of limburger reminiscence, which was
liable to cause the effigy of freedom on her mountain height to
experience a very tired feeling. The etiquette of war and the eternal
laws of military necessity governed his movements and halts, his
stations and stock, his buying and selling. None of the syrupy
sweetness and languid trickle of spring poetry voiced his experiences,
tempting to practices incompatible with the professions of one who
desires to lead an earnest life. The list of his permissibles embraced
a varied miscellany of _non-desiderata_, vast as the outfit of the
greatest show on this or any other earth. The catalogue of contraband
exhibited numberless objects of universal allurement. Peradventure his
lockers held six gross of pale pills for pink people (no buyer);
meantime his patrons clamored for cheese, cheese, when there was no
cheese; not a microbe. Marvel not that wrath accumulated and men
bewailed--some men never do get through teething.
Thus the irony of his fortune was more bitter than the jollity of a
wake, with the corpse lying in state next door. While popular articles
were quickly sold or stolen, the residuary stuff, howling abominations
which none would buy or steal, lingered flyblown or fermenting. They
were satirized and flouted by the dullest varlets in the regiment, who
were notably afflicted with Ananias-and-Sapphira paresis, and to whom
life's solemnest solemnities were a grimace and a grin. 'Tis ever
thus, for human nature has been the same since the earliest ages began
developing a monogram mania, when the sons of the stars first
fascinated the daughters of men. Every true and honorable mob always
holds in scornful contempt each simplest symbol of constituted
authority, especially when constituted by itself. Even so, all genuine
soldiers felt obliged to fleer and jeer at everything hidden or
concealed in that cavern of despair wherein our hero reigned. They
gave him the marble heart in the loud three-em dash newspaper style of
emphasis. They swore by the dorsal fins of a planked white fish that
he was a paroxysmal, flamboyant fraud, and showered on him weird
variations of the standard oriental malediction; may his countenance
be inverted diagonal-wise, and donkeys browse on his grandmother's
grave! They floated him to perdition hourly on the brimstone vapors of
their anathema, and soon beckoned him back again in the renaissance of
their whetted appetite. Then he assumed a fictitious importance,
sufficient indeed in more recent times to have almost entitled him to
arrive at a New York hotel.
Probably no Sutler's stock was ever submitted to the critical and
crucial operation of an inventory, presided over by an expert
accountant's freshly laundered mustache, and cold, cruel, thin-lipped
smile. The variety of such an inventory would be as attractive as that
of the village landlord's menu--ram, lamb, sheep and mutton. Its
metaphysics would be unique as a bi-metallic understudy; its
mathematics only less recondite than a census of the baccilli encysted
in the buzzard's beak on a standard dollar, mintage of 'eighty-one. An
exhaustive attempt, at the present day, to remedy this omission would
certainly involve serious risk of undue spiritual exhilaration and
intellectual intoxication. But a partial list, achieved at any
specified stage of a vigorous campaign, would have read something like
this:
Wooden combs and Mexican spurs.
Gutta-percha bivalves (cove).
Pretzels--prophetic of the hard, hard times which marked an era of
Hoke Smith and Dink Botts statesmanship.
Effete cigars, bunch-grass filling, wrapped in genuine Havana onion
leaves at Wethersfield, in the state of Connecticut.
Plug tobacco advanced in ossification.
Smoking ditto, premonitory of asbestos; infinite in capacity for
provocation; imitating in incombustibility the sullen defiance of a
dead, cold epigram.
Epsom salts.
Smoked herring, also salt.
Gingerbread, composted chiefly of sawdust, coal slack, tar, syrup and
chopped feed.
Joke books, solemn as the summersault of the trick elephant in his
dotage.
Cookies, tough enough to be handed down as heirlooms to the Weary
Waggleses of futurity.
Rancid sardines, to be swallowed fin and scale, head and tail.
Pistol cartridges, watch keys, jack-knives, pills, and lead pencils
conspicuous chiefly for brittleness.
Bologna sausages of the conglomerate era, petrified; like our glorious
Union, invincible and indivisible.
Engine-turned pickles, submerged in carbolic acid and frosted with
vitriol crystals; positively antiscorbutic.
Incohesive tooth-brushes cut loose from their base of supplies.
Long clay pipes after the form aesthetically affected by the honest
Hollander, bibulous, amphibious and narcotic.
Dry figs and wormy raisins, savory as the juice of hard tack or
tent-pin syrup.
Anonymous liquid perdition in sneaking disguises, which, judged by its
taste, was a cheap grade of _spiritus strychniti_, but judged by its
price was molten pearl diluted with dissolved diamond.
Sundries, etc., etc.
Supposed necessaries of luxurious military existence some of these,
more or less urgent even when subsisting on the enemy. In that case
the conversion by assimilation of Confederate provender into Yankee
bone and sinew was a delicious, romantic, patriotic, praiseworthy
function. The patriots rather enjoyed this process, but they welcomed
assistance from the foregoing catalogue.
Many articles were purchasable only in those _post_-pay-day periods
when the center of financial gravity had been shifted by the
exigencies of chuck-a-luck and old sledge from many pockets to one. It
is an eminently usable list, resources permitting. Few of the
impracticable inutilities of dollar stores or charity bazaars lift
here their suspected forms, requiring us to exhaust all statutory and
common-law remedies against conspiracy to do great bodily harm. Few of
the frabbles are seen which adorn and dignify the dress-suit breakfast
given by smirking domestic snobs to a titled foreign fraud,
unintelligible as a Blavatsky theosophist. Yet even these, to the
insatiate askers of the bivouc, would never quite suffice. Do what he
could, the Sutler was ever fated to get himself disliked. A boy is a
series of accidents at best. Some of the recruits in their haste to
enlist forgot to provide themselves with a girl to leave behind. Those
persons, unnerved by the bewildering entanglements of Hardee's
tactics, and with no restorative compensations, were never satisfied.
They were iron-jawed steam-talkers of calamity, perpetually assailing
the walls of rebellion with huge explosions of wrath, and the flaps of
the Sutler's tent with the roar of their grumbling. Deafening was
their clamor for some absent staple to which distance lent the
deceptive enchantment of a dining-car menu; deep their dismay that it
was not held perennially on tap. Providence, assisted by timely hints
from the wagon master, sometimes brought the supply trains within
speaking distance by flag signal. But no discoverable influence ever
succeeded in keeping a Sutler's stock up to high-water mark of
gustatory demand. And all was in the ultimate cooked down to dire
alternative of buy (or steal) and have, or do without and gnaw a file
and swear.
As a rule the radiant and responsive Sutler embarked on his voyage
militant with more or less capital and credit to back up the spirit of
acquisitiveness which possessed him with all its quenchless
inflammation. They were either his own, or that of the silent partner
who procured his appointment, mayhap a modest and mouse-colored
statesman from the remote suburbs, but whose identity was a secret
between himself and high heaven. Both capital and credit were prone to
evanescence equal to that of the pungent delicacy called quinine, sole
sworn antidote to innumerable gastric plagues. They oozed as oozed
insurgent hopes when Vicksburg fell, and the Confederacy, like the
vail of Solomon's temple, was rent in twain. A balance sheet after one
year's multiplication of tribulation, if the victim managed to survive
that long, would usually disclose, on the one side, liabilities to the
full extent of capital plus credit as aforesaid, the latter perhaps
pitted with very large small-pox scars. On the other side was an array
of dubious assets, embracing chiefly a tattered tent, a shattered
wagon and a battered team, five hundred pounds of scorned sundries,
sour and fusty, together with a fat ledger-full of "charges" against
the killed, wounded and missing, who by a mysterious fatality had been
his largest if not his only patrons. Hence this vexation that made him
say things innocent youth should not be permitted to hear. Hence those
tears, scalding even the nickel-steel armor of his cheeks. Therefore
those sobs, soulful as if wrung from the viscera of a sixteen-dollar
melodeon. Who hath hoarseness of voice? The tearful penitent afflicted
with mouth-gout and knee-failure on the morning after a debauch; he
speaks in muffled tones suggestive of a chastening headache. Who hath
redness of eyes? Surely he that tarryeth long over a Sutler's trial
balance, consecrated to the apotheosis of infinitesimals.
The Sutler was subject to a military discipline varying from the
fierce precision of a Springfield rifle to the grotesque, picturesque
and variegated eccentricities of an Austrian musket. He ranked a
trifle lower than a mule, but a fraction higher than a corporal. In
that principally, if mislaid or lost in action, he did not need to be
officially accounted for in the returns like a mule, and would have
slightly better prospects than a corporal of posthumous mutilation as
to cognomen in the telegrams. The law recognized him and orders
shielded him. That was theory. The veterans jeered at him as at the
inexpressibly uncouth antics of the drafted raw disciple; everybody
kicked and cursed and plundered him. That was practice. The difference
was palpable as a headlight scarfpin; startling as the butcher's bill
after a charge on repeating rifle pits; significant as the evolution
of a human female form divine from cowskin frock and burlap leggins of
semi-savagery to high-shouldered polka-dot robings of advanced
civilization--further exalted with a laudable ambition to improve the
breed of pug puppies.