commodious, commanding stump, observing the struggle with a rural
Sunday morning cheerfulness_]
The rich man unlearned in logic hires logic in form of a lawyer to
prove anything it is profitable to have proven. So a Sutler, destitute
of arms, knows that his armed compatriots will rescue his appetizing
goods from the enemy's most ferocious onslaughts, howbeit but to be
skinned and skimmed by themselves next moment before his
horror-smitten face, with comments recordable only in violation of
several salubrious enactments for the suppression of blasphemy.
Perhaps tradition has been too caustic or too facetious in its
treatment of the unarmed soldiers who honored us with their
comradeship--the chaplain, the surgeon and the Sutler. Of the army
preacher, who filled his sacred office worthily as many did, let due
and reverent acknowledgment be made, in grateful memory of benignant
functions purely administered; "the gowned goslings, who were goslings
before they were gowned," let us in mercy and in pity commit to the
tenderness of eternal silence. The typical army doctor was skillful,
devoted, brave and self-sacrificing; at the front amid the blaze and
storm of battle; in the rear wrestling with festering wounds or
wasting fevers and contagions; everywhere his welcome, hopeful
features beamed in gracious blessing on us at our sorest need, and
each of us who lives to-day can name the surgeon to whom that life is
due. Even the Sutler, of whom we have been treating subjectively and
perhaps too unceremoniously herein, when reduced to his objective
individual status, has often supplied material for illustrating the
highest grade of patriotic heroism. The Sutlership was an agency not
devoid of utility, not without the noblest possibilities, by no means
unworthy of honor. Let no poet of the war, sitting in the refreshment
of the foliage of his phrases and sipping the coolness of the gases of
his gall, dare ignore these patent, blatant truths of history. Or if
he do, let him be doubly and trebly ware! It is certain that enough
scattered, incontrovertible, granite bowlders of fact lie snugly
imbedded in the conglomerate of fancy, to roll forward at the final
round-up and everlastingly necropolize him.
Where is the Sutler now? Vanished from our ken and beyond all cavil
non-existent.
History has few parallels to this absolute obliteration of a species.
The bronzed old admiral emeritus is still extant, with tar on his heel
and salt in his eyebrows. Generals in active service thread the
German's mazes, agile as when in slim-waisted cadet days they paced
flirtation walk, in all the pomp and circumstance of glorious gray.
The retired list, infallible patent of longevity, lifts high its proud
engrossment of venerable colonels and brigadiers, spattered at times
with ill-flavored congressional epithets and blown about by every
breeze of statesmanship, but yielding still its liberal monthly
stipend; there too the Sutler's brief, broad, brambly service is
unrecognized. The village boaster boasteth still his grand exploits
as the sunset of life crowns a mystical bore. But no Sutler is here or
there discerned.
Our pension rolls bear names scarce short a million, but his holds
there no objurated blazonry. Myriads of veterans luxuriate in
soldiers' homes, but in none of them does he, lingering and voluble,
saturated with _vis inertia_, shoulder a crutch and tell how money
never is but always to be won. When hale campaigners meet at
non-intoxicating suppers where the cheers are not inebriated, and
point to themselves with pride (who dare gainsay their right?), his
place is but a yawning vacancy. River pilots of the war era, St. Vitus
stricken from dodging guerrilla buckshot, have coveted the Grand Army
badge; sons of sanitary heroes and of honorable women not a few have
pleaded for the Loyal Legion's perquisites vicarious; but no residual
Sutler, nor the lineal progeny thereof, draws drafts like these on
honor's ample funds. Hence there is no Sutler left, q. e. d. He never
got left--the good die young.
Seek ye his obituary in the thin cold records of the alms-house. Find
his flat or sunken resting place in crowded silences of Potter's
fields and be therewith content. He has passed in his "checks." He
lives now only as a fond and fragrant memory.
THE SHELTER TENT
III
Lustrous among war's unfading reminiscences shines the contour of the
Shelter Tent. It lingers in memory, unique and delectable, dissimilar
but equivalent to our ideal of those fringed silken pavilions wherein
apoplectic despots of the orient air their scandalous magnificence
amid the frockless squalor of their cringing hordes.
The Shelter Tent was a supplement to the original scheme for putting
down the rebellion--a fact, as it were, _dehors_ the record. Only
after Bull Run and Shiloh and Antietam and Iuka was the government
nerved to the point of requiring its soldiery to shoulder their
houses like mollusks, and thus relieve the tuneful, uncomplaining mule
of a sore responsibility.
This was an innovation whose dam was Necessity, and whose sire was
held to be some emissary of Satan, with an unearned increment of
prestige in the counsels of Halleck, general-in-chief, so-called. It
was evolved as the molecule evolves protoplasm and from a plastic cell
developeth primordial germs. Versatile scorners, voluble as advocates
of artesian irrigation, promptly scheduled its pedigree for
generations up and down. Minutest of constructed residences for living
humanity, save perhaps the half-credible tub of tough Diogenes, it won
a way into our reluctant liking that vindicates its title to
consideration among the factors of ultimate victory. You may pay the
doctor to diagnose and also to prescribe, but you must subsidize the
pharmacist before relief is possible.
Most portable of mundane mansions, its very littleness relieved the
situation of numberless infelicities,--specifically, of servitude to
servants, whether apple-cheeked daughters of Denmark, or
saddle-colored Cantonese with eyes cut bias and a Pacific Mail subsidy
lingo not on speaking terms with veracity. Likewise other infelicities
which relegate housekeeping to the level of a cantharides blister, and
which make court corridors ring with the battle-cry for freedom
shouted by luckless suitors who married in haste to repent at Sioux
Falls.
The Shelter Tent of the war for the Union, so waged, as
aforementioned, is said to have been a French device. We shall
introduce no evidence in rebuttal. It was unquestionably steeped to
the hem in martial economics. It was calculated to rob a miser of all
that life holds dear. The force of dire frugality could no step
farther go. In the multitude of counselors there is distraction, for
existence, like a court-house, is full of trials. But all agree on
this question of economy. We lead the world, but the French lead us in
these little every-day parsimonies. It was cheap but grand. Beecher
once asserted that flowers are the grandest things God ever made
without putting an immortal soul into them. Beecher had evidently at
that time never treated his optic nerve to a vision of the useful,
unobtrusive Shelter Tent.
Woven of white cotton spun to fascine rigidity, sometimes
gutta-perchaed to counterscarp imperviousness, its flat measurement
but squared an average soldier's stature. When the whirl of recoil
developed into a torrent of flight, it was scarcely classed with
_impedimenta_.
A weed is said to be only a plant whose uses have not yet been
discerned. This square of cotton was to the unsophisticated military
discernment first a weed, then a spear, then a full-grown corn in the
ear--yea, verily! shelled and in the sack, distilled and in the
cut-glass decanter, with accessories duly accessible.
Styled "tent" in the sardonic nomenclature of our nomadic days, it was
in sober verity a wrap, a cape, a kirtle or a poncho, which only by
connected duplication and reduplication came within the pale of that
sonorous title. Only ten men are permitted to exist on earth at once
competent to read and understand Plato. Thus precious is equilibrium
in a world where the fragment of a donkey jaw has slain thousands.
Fewer doubtless would divine at first blush how a square of cotton
fabric, set down one side with buttons and holes to match cut
opposite, could suffice for each warrior's allotment of habitation in
embryo. Still fewer would devise, until Necessity, doting maternal
ancestor of rarest constructive genius, came to compel, the forms and
structures of abode that lay susceptible within that so innocent
appearing segment of a textile web, white, friendly and tractable.
Thus history goes on, dancing through the airy nothingness of
experiment, dainty as a harebell, graceful as a fawn.
Of what the Shelter Tent had and had not, commended curiosity makes
now minute interrogation. It had neither veranda nor portico; if
offenses must come, woe to them whereby. No latticed porchway tempted
humming birds to linger in its honeysuckle haunts. The bay-window that
biteth like a serpent and stingeth like a cactus when the bill comes
in, was conspicuously non-existent. Its architectural flippancies were
few indeed. No fluted town hall pillars nor St. Gauden's
blush-promoting statuary decorated its blameless exterior, either for
botch or betterment. No black closets fanged with sharp hooks and
breathing pestilent mustiness lurked in its dreadful depths,
threatening to precipitate a ministerial crisis around the conjugal
hearth.
The man of far western enterprise, who goes forth with nothing but a
few ounces of salt in one hand and a halter in the other to a career
of sudden and certain prosperity, would sneer at a plan for his rustic
villa of content so void of all embellishment. The rampant eastern
egotist, saturated with profound, uncanny mysticism, would echo the
supercilious sentiment.
Guiltless of tapestry, even of paper tattooed into isosceles triangles
or fretted with peafowl tintages, were its walls. Nay, vetoed were
walls indeed, save when some mad riot of sumptuousness inspired an
imitation of "society"--that medley of metaphysics and flirtations, of
fashion, vanity, jealousy, altruism, rheumatism and gastronomy which
is principally intent on beating tom-toms and dodging jim-jams. Then,
hoisted above its normal altitude, like sliding roof of clover rick, a
rough joinery of boards or logs or turf, breasted it up four-square to
all the gusts of Boreas and the moral agencies of southern Arkansaw.
No door-plate shimmered, purporting, in gothic undecipherables gnarly
as Pharaoh's lean kine, to name the occupant. Good cause, forsooth;
none better! No door, on which a faintest shimmer could be hung,
graced the wide frontal vacancy. Who entered here, though his brow
were tall and his spirit strong, left his _bon-ton_ behind. Style,
root of much heart-break and hen-peck, was smitten as by the stony paw
of a sphinx. Fit symbols of existence in this pretenseless home were
the broken column and the gates ajar.
Destitute also was the Shelter Tent of the pompous excrescence of
chimneys, and their accessories,--of the parlor mantel, laden with
sea-shells and aconite pellets,--of the stove in the guest chamber,
voluble in prophecies of smokeless combustion, unhopeful as the
courting of a grass-widow with an inchoate right of dower to forty
acres of swamp land in a school section,--of the hanging book-shelf,
heavy with dull fiction and smeared with poetical syrup. No chimney
was there to witness the woes of perplexed Santa Claus. No chimney was
there to gaze with wide-eyed wonder on the tragedy which ensues when
Uncle Reuben blows out the gas. No chimney was there, with open gusty
grate, more dreary than the lignite desolation of the bad lands.
Minus likewise were chandeliers, with their brazen sheen,--mementos of
dismal experience with colicky infants at paregoric time,--mementos of
sweltering social hilarity, when perspiration is unconfined and heels
smite corns on toes that groan again,--mementos of genteel functions,
where pink and purple ice cream circulates at par, and French-plate
diamonds flash on palpitating bosoms perilously exposed to the
weather.
Chandeliers were extinct and non-existent. Candles stuck in bayonets
sufficed. There was light enough for a nightly prosecution of the
poker industry and for overproduction of the chestnut crop. And even
after taps, when utter darkness reigned, there was no danger of
bumping one's head against the upper berth.
No walls of partition parceled off the Shelter Tent into spaces
conventionalized to pecular functions. Aristocracy of exclusion and
seclusion there were none, but broad and limpid democracy of exposure
to all curiousness, though searching as croton oil. Hence
drawing-room, boudoir and kitchen, oratory, refectory, and lavatory
were all in one. But only in alternation, since the contracted area
precluded simultaneousness as well as latitudinarianism. There was no
disgraceful scramble for the apartment with southern exposure and all
modern conveniences. There was little risk of bringing a blush of
modesty to the veteran's bronzed and massive cheek. Partitions would
have been useless as a pop factory in the bluegrass region. Each
tenant was the peer in imperturbability of a male divorcee in
Connecticut, digging clams to earn alimony.
Area was not its boast. A well equipped farm on the Little Missouri is
said to consist of a due allowance of sunny sky, a pair of bob-sleds
and a gopher hole. There naturally prevail the financial views which
demand a currency based on pig-iron, short-ribs, hoop-poles and wheat
screenings.
No lightning-rod adorned its frowning pediment, lank and fatiguing
reminder of Ben Franklin,--thrifty printer,--and his kite, such as
never was before in air or tree; also of the glib and evanescent
vendor whose monopoly of all fascinations was only equaled by his
absolute prostration of all moral attributes. That convoluted metallic
insufficiency thrust not its aluminum barb above the crest of this
domicile, like a reed shaken by the wind, mute witness to each passer
of the owner's sweet credulity.
Trifling in weight, as was each segment of the Shelter Tent,
unappreciable addition to individual burden, and willingly borne for
the increased facility and certainty of bivouac, the aggregate relief
to the department of transportation was like shriving a bad man's
conscience of crime or lifting a fear from a coward's soul. The
reduction of regimental trains from thirteen wagons to three was as
efficient in ultimate results as the withdrawal of guards from
confederate poultry-coops and the obliteration of zouave jackets;
possibly more so.
The Shelter Tent was the after-glow of an understudy, so to speak, but
it was a potent helper in the grand tragedy. It came into war annals
greeted with a welcome warm as that vouchsafed on election night to
the missing precinct that brings the necessary majority. This welcome
was tendered when use brought due appreciation of its value, not
earlier. Its original introduction was as sensational as when John
Barleycorn comes to town, and brings his blizzard with him. Its first
arrival met with jeers; with hot reviling; with barkings imitative of
indignant dog, or brayings as of disgusted donkey; with cursings such
as tear the curser's lungs to ragged tatters; with mellowing miracles
of profanest speech, horizonless trans-continental sentences of words
hurled endlong, overthwart, each word a stab or blister; with mutiny
and riot ludicrous to recall. But all in vain. Reeking language, that
put immortal souls in peril, availed nothing.
The Shelter Tent came for use, and it came to stay. Orders were
imperative and discipline was supreme. Jeering, barking, braying,
cursing, rioting were as futile as the purr of a Vassar kitten at the
advent of a long-haired aesthete, wearing an air of discontent and a
coat with efflorescent elbows.
It was prescribed and issued. The average visitor to Washington is
welcomed to his nation's proud capital with loud acclaim by the hack
fiend and the hotel runner, both Afro-American. The Shelter Tent was
welcomed with corresponding warmth, as aforesaid, when its utility
began to materialize. Out into the pink and pearl of morning sunshine,
or into a sour, dreary, morning drizzle, step from it the tentmates of
a night's camp. They were proud as the Jerseyman who boasts his
descent "from the family of Smith-Smiths, connected by a syphon." They
were free from the proverbial weary, next-morning-condition of civil
life, for sleep profound had knitted up the raveled stocking heel of
care. Each carried a moiety of homestead folded in the knapsack
strapped to his stalwart form, and stepped out with a sublime song of
triumph on his lips and in his heart. Each carried his own house. He
also laughed at his own jokes with a loud tenor tone. Marvel of more
than this marvelous facility of home-shifting was our inimitable
volunteer. He bore constantly also his year's wardrobe and his week's
provender, toothsome (though less tender) as planked whitefish from
the cold and classic Assiniboin. Likewise, his drink, his tools
tonsorial, manicurial and dentifric, such as fate vouchsafed and
regulations permitted. In addition he bore his bed, his financial
capital and surplus, his arsenal of projectiles, his weapons of
offense, his instruments of torture, and his implements of toil.
Strength considered, no pack-horse carried a weightier lading, and yet
the soldier was denied the dull, dumb creature's exemption from
rational accountability.
Thus freighted with belligerent melange the mobilized veteran marches
all day, with his thinking bayonet at his side, his logical musket on
his shoulder, and his profane vocabulary held in measurable
subjection, the nominative agreeing with the verb occasionally by
accident.
On through hot and bitter limestone dust that blanches all his
cuticle, then reddens eyes and nose and mouth with unsanctified
inflammation. On through floundering quagmires of yellow mud that
settles into slush, then slumps into slime; vivid parallel to the
moral collapse of a white-souled commissary warmed by beams of
opportunity and trodden by hoofs of temptation.
On through heat excruciating or cold unendurable; through rain, sleet,
hail,--storm's dread alternations of discomfort,--all the lengthening
day, his trousers shrinking to knee-pants as he trudges along. On,
footsore and halting, each nerve a roadway for pain's burning steps,
each bone racked with rheumatic twinges, until night brings the
limping turnpike tourist to a welcome resting-place.
The bivouac then, and full-orbed glory of the Shelter Tent! Matchless
for adaptation, it is pitched as soon as ranks are broken. The
landscape whitens with swift magic like a Monday's clothes-line
billowy with confidential raiment. The tentmates join the sundered
segments, and with sticks or stalks or poles, or, lacking these, with
bayonet and gun and ramrod, lift the flexile sheet to the required
angle, and lo! their dwelling stands confessed; no spectacular
monstrosity, but compact, cleanly and stylish as a salad dressed in
oil.
Hasty, most hasty, also of formalities and frills devoid, the varied
events which thereupon eventuate. The search for wood and water,
energetic as the pace of reckless engineer, who goes by the meeting
point at a mile and a half a minute calling for more steam. The
ablutions, rich in doleful reminiscence of rare and radiant days at
home when the brow was wiped with cabbage leaves or cotton waste;
vivid with memories of the printing-house towel that hangs by the
door.
The cooking simple and savory; the cook with a look of far-away
Georgia in his face, across whose peaceful breast salt waves of
trouble roll, but from whose humble lips no back-talk comes. The
mastication, almost as irritating as classical music, save as spiced
with time-honored facetiae wrested from some wrecked parthenon;
long-distance jokes that would bore easily through an inch plank and
kill at random.
Drinking straight and plain from the flat but priceless old canteen,
out of whose limpid depths, with a gurgling capacity of one miner's
inch per second, are drawn exhaustless liquid refreshments that shame
the isles of Greece, the hills of Spain, the purple heaven of
Rome,--in dreams thou livest on! Above all, post-prandial exercise of
dry dishwashery with a chip, exuding bicarbonate of turnpike dust; one
touch of water makes the whole camp grin.
Then comes, with briefest interlude for rest, or recreation, or
knocking out spot after spot of the decalogue on the sly, swift
preparation for the few, short hours of nocturnal repose; profound as
a policeman with clews to a stabbing mystery; dreamless as some
cold-sliced fragment of the long ago, sitting passionless through
chasing, racing ages. Tentmates are nervous with the fatigues of march
and nettlesome as bibulous companions in civil life, who quarrel about
trifles slight as hair; then settle their quarrels over a round of the
rosy; and finally quarrel afresh as to who shall liquidate for the
liquor.
The night may be moonlit, starry, glum as a ghoul, dark as black
bullocks of Galloway, or terrible with thunder-bursts and drenching
rains and blowing of great guns. Valor is an indeterminate essence; at
times the essence will ooze; much depends on the status; few men are
supremely valorous in the dark.
Plato considered that woman was intended to do the same things as man,
only not so well. It is currently suspected, however, that women can
fight better than their brothers in that grewsome darkest hour which
just precedes the dawn, when so many attacks are planned which mostly
fail. Exceptions should possibly be noted in favor of the emancipated
female trotting out of her class; specially against the timid man who
has been dragged all night over loose stones, at the tail of a wild
nightmare.
Sleep comes at last, and the camp sounds lull, not startle; peaceful,
innocent, harmless as the fresh-laid humorist pleading for a little
more civilization among the higher classes. Soporific is the sentry's
slow, reluctant Amsterdam tramp, as he strides, bemoiled by the long
day's detritus, wrapped mostly in the wailing winds; also the electric
interurban symphony of snorings manifold, which care not one coreless
clam what nationality stands guard to-night; the weird signals of the
fond melodious mule struggling with anchylosis of thoracic
articulation, and betimes bursting into an effort that saturates seven
cubic miles of atmosphere with familiar mule music in seventeen
seconds; the melancholy squeak of a belated sutler's wagon, grinding
out its assent to the maxim that a linch-pin in time saves an axle;
the hoot of a discontented owl in branches not remote; the howl of
expostulatory cur in distant farm-yard; the intercepted shriek of far
off poultry, prey of some army prowler who strews the ground with
severed heads and hot red spurts of gore.
Soporific is all this medley of celluloid resonance; softer than the
first symptoms of velvety resistance on a youth's lip; smoother than
the etiquette of a square meal at a round-table; provocative all of
serenest, soundest sleep, until joyless reveille shall come, summoning
from iridescent dreams to another day of inglorious unromantic
toiling--double column at half distance and then double distance on
half rations.