relaxation, born of an assured half-week's unthreatened encampment
serenity. Then the _recherche_ loungers in the Shelter Tent, clinking
their useless double-eagles together with capitalistic nonchalance,
revel in tutti-frutti visions of banished splendors and foresworn
delights. Those bright single-gold-standard days haunt us still, with
the persistence of a sixty winter damsel in her frosty bloom. The
cribbed and coffined quarters expand into peopled vistas of epicurean
magnificence, elusive and deceptive as a tax on dinner pails. Therein
the mirage of gorgeous furnishings alternates or mingles with the
phantasm of delicate potables, with a bewildering miscellaneousness
that recalls Agassiz's dictum on the impossibility of reconciling
American stratifications.
Throw physic to the dogs--they need thinning out anyhow, but preserve
your hallucinations; four generations of gentility are required to
produce a boy without freckles. P. S. Give the negro a chance! Eighty
generations barely sufficed to evolve a white man capable of inventing
the postage stamp. Just four hundred years were occupied by the whites
in conquering the Indians, with the powerful aid of rum, gunpowder and
Indian agents.
As we remarked, the furnishings of these visions were extremely
gorgeous. Cashmere, Bokarra and Khivan rugs bespread the marqueterie
floors. Also, delicate the potables. Ragouts, chow-chow, dinde glace,
truffles, soquille, sorbot, terrapin, sauterne, cognac and extra dry
cover the beckoning tables; nectar, nectar everywhere and every drop
imbibable. Imported, perhaps, through Signor Sp. Frumenti, of Genoa.
Behold priceless bijoux of Louis Quinze,--buhl, Sevres, Limoges,
Dalton, and Royal Vienna; treasures of ormolu and ivory, and Carrara;
wonders of faience and Satsuma; quaint carvings from Padua, Tokio,
Delhi and Antwerp, in ebony or sandal or teak or immemorial oak! All
for ornament rather than utility, like the ears of a mule which have
been stationed too far in front for wings, and too high up for
fly-scares. Here are poems in brass, anthems in eternal bronze,
pastorals in Dresden, mythologies in the grinning idols of Cathay,
miracles in Gobelin and Daubisson; relics of the by-flown, fly-blown
past, before the great, red dragon of Wall street had been hatched and
hated.
There are scimiter and falchion from the days of Lionheart, inwrought
with golden arabesque by fezzed wizards in Teheran. There are
poniards, it may be, reviving proud, glad, gladiatorial days, when
men were muscled like the brawny, aged hen. They fought with bloody
bludgeons long and well; or with sharp rapier carved the lion's liver
from his agile frame, while smiling beauty munched the Roman caramel
and saw with tearless lid the brave ones sink beneath hard blows more
deadly than the modern pie.
Here swing hangings more valued than jewels; silk woven in the
caliphs' harems; yellowing marvels of Chantilly; glowing glories of
Corot and Daubigny, Gerome, Vibert, Meissonier, Millais or
Rembrandt--unequaled as to flesh tints; superior even to most chromos.
Ah, yes! Roast venison, fried chicken, stuffed oysters, broiled
lobster, sausage with sauerkraut, beefsteak and onions on the half
shell. The mills of the cooks grind slowly, but they grind, even
though their recipes be less intelligible than the personal
recollections of a giraffe.
All these things float and allure and dazzle and tempt in the soaring
fancy of the dilettante militant, who is lifted from a deep dark
Hamlet melancholy to semi-celestial altitudes. But a drum-tap or a
horse-neigh brings him down with a dull thud to the cramped coarse
environment where he is tethered like an uneasy Indian restricted to a
mental reservation. Blessed is the voluptuousness of reverie; blessed
and cheap as an expectant clothier's greeting, while he pauses
ecstatically for an appropriate smile; blessed and safe as flirting by
telephone with a centripetal divinity at the exchange, sweet-voiced,
invisible and anonymous; blessed but unsatisfying as a tariff reform
bill stuffed with local concessions.
From roseate fantasy to grim realism is a tumble sharp and sudden to
the dreamer in the Shelter Tent.
His ormolu and bijoutry consist of a deformed pocket mirror and a
foreshortened pipe black as bombazine grief. His floor is honest old
earth, rugless, plankless, naked as a marble Venus and cold as New
England culture.
His decorated couch of down and carved mahogany, ebony inlaid, is
superseded by a blanket and six fence-rails--rails quilled with
keen splinters like the frightful porcupine; blanket harboring fecund
colonies of that fraternal insect whose tentacles are inextricably
entangled with every shuddering recollection of army vicissitudes;
inescapable, inexpungable, yet nameless here forever more.
[Illustration: ... _Blessed is the voluptuousness of reverie, blessed
and cheap as an expectant clothier's greeting, while he pauses
ecstatically for an appropriate smile_]
His dresser of polished green malachite, silver-trimmed, shrinks to a
surreptitious cracker-box hiding certain confiscated edibles for which
some adjacent smoke-house holds a yawning vacancy, while Rachel weeps
for her turkeys and refuses to be comforted because they were shot.
In the said cracker-box, like a jewel in a toad's tooth, we may also
find all that can legitimately represent in fact the figments of our
hero's appetizing hallucinations, the customary ration of his daily
gulp and growl. Here is hard, hard bread, stamped B. C., so dry that
age can not wither it nor bicuspid masticate; acrid and bellicose
pork, premonitory of thirst and tapeworm, rich in albuminates, but
utterly poverty-stricken as to savor, odor and social status. Here is
raw beef from the east rump of a most attenuated anatomy, doubtful as
the welcome of an uninvited visitor; sufficient unto the soup is the
toughness thereof, no less.
The uses of venerable and ubiquitous hard-tack were as numerous as
they were suggestive. Its presence in all emergencies was one of the
mysteries of the eternal law of supply and demand, one of the grand
consummations and compensations of the art of war. In its natural
state it was dry, flinty, tasteless and juiceless, but stored as full
of nutriment as a serenade of musty eggs and flagrant onions is
stuffed with archaic perfumes. Smashed into chiplets with a hammer,
moistened to pulpiness in cold water, fried in pork fat and served
hot, it was dubbed "slumgullion." Pounded to gritty dust, reduced to
thick dough with warm water, seasoned with salt and pepper and baked
in thick cakes, it became fit ambrosia for the sages of the ages and
was known as "Son-of-a-gun." Burned to a crisp, boiled in water, and
eaten with a spoon it was as thoroughly disguised as odorless whisky
or smokeless tobacco, in the soubriquet "gum chowder."
In combination with green apple fricasse, chicken stews, fresh pig
roasts, and other sequestered interludes of commissariat anomalistic,
it grew toothsome, ingenious, diversified. It was withal as acceptable
to the muscular appetites of voracious young warriors as was a drafted
man's certificate of exemption based on intermittent cramps in the
stomach and a devout devoted mother-in-law dependent on him for
support.
Here are the small white beans, anhydrous, true angel food, beloved of
cherubim, immortalized in song, theme of interminable romance, most
potent, grave and carbo-hydrate provender, seductive as a jack-pot,
and satisfying as a high-church wedding service to a middlings
purifier heiress; here, also, the indispensable coffee, and sugar
wherewith it shall be confected, twin relics of homeland, sole
reminder of hearthstones _ante bellum_. Here is rice, nourishing to
Buddha and Confucius, redolent of joss-house and bungalow, chief of
staff of the life of languid anthropophagi.
Here are desiccated vegetables; culmination of humiliation to nostril
and stomach; a cross between counter-irritant and disinfectant;
plausible as an argument for free raw material. Likewise concentrated
milk, Queen Anne style; acidulated in the thunder-storms of centuries;
more mysterious than the doctrine of dynamics to a colored youth
gorged with clandestine watermelon. Also "rations" of soap of a
retiring early disposition; facing a condition, not a theory; compost
of refuse alkaline and oleagenous, but with soaring spirit of the army
mule stowed in a steamer's hold until he soaks the air with sounds of
remonstrance, kicks the rivets from the boiler and goes aloft with the
explosion.
Moreover, all the frugal condiments and seasonings which, like timely
words in a hot dispute, act chemically and precipitate the
sediment--all these made lawful by the Articles of War and acts
thereto amendatory. All these this shaky, unassuming cracker-box,
chief of the snuggery's appointments, foremost in furnishing the
Shelter Tent, doth garner and conceal with more than sealing-wax
fidelity. Upon it rest the empty haversack, the dry canteen, the waist
belt, bayonet scabbard, gunsling, and like _et cetera_ of unused
accoutrement, terrible to the turbulent classes, sharing their owner's
earned and relished respite.
These aforesaid articles, together with a valuable collection of
narrow escapes, constituted his tabulated assets, including capital,
surplus and undivided profits. By reason of wealth he would not have
been like the camel debarred from threading the needle's eye. But he
was happy, nevertheless; happy as the free laborers who proudly wear
untaxed overalls woven in foreign parts, and socks from the isles of
the sea.
The Shelter Tent was not immortal, at least in the concrete. Neither
was its occupant, howsoever swollen in the pride of his heart and
other viscera over the sacredness of his cause and the splendor of his
triumph. If immortality is to be achieved for the tent, the pen of
history or the still small penetrating voice of tradition must be
detailed for that duty. The Bengal tiger must not mew like inferior
families of the felidae, but here were a theme worthy the stanchest
bard that glooms beneath the shining stars.
The texture of the Shelter Tent, though rivaling a corrugated copper
casket as moisture proof, was far from indestructible. Worn to
windowed raggedness was its final aspect, slashed, punched,
shot-holed, and abraded, but faithful and useful to the end. Scorched
also it may be, begrimed and soiled, march-stained and battle-singed,
linked to its primal whiteness only as the vestal virgin of the
Cuthead Sioux tepee is to her star-eyed Athenian prototype.
No matter. The cause in which its beauty and strength were expended
was richly worth this, and all the infinitely more precious cost. We
rejoice to believe that the events we commemorate were the ushering in
of a millennial epoch in human history. We stand, as it were, wrapped
still in obscurities, when a moonless night studded with glints of
silver wears toward its end and the horizon of the favored east
flushes with first promise of approaching day. Vague outlines of
distant summits marshal themselves against the brightening azure, and
soon flashes of crimson and purple playfully chase each other up to
the silent zenith. Shafts of unutterable splendor begin to shoot
through all the pulsing atmosphere, thrilling awakened nature with
reviving life, a harbinger of coming glory.
And when earth has been clothed with magnificence for his royal
appearing, the sun himself wheels up from the nether deep, thus
heralded and attended with all due pomp of an unchallenged majesty.
His affluent beams pour in molten cascades down the revealed gorges;
they gild and glorify clustered pinnacles; they awake into sparkling
greenness the pine-clad slopes, and flame into burning scarlet on
banks of hidden bloom. Then rising higher with the mists of morning
still enrobing him, while hymning echoes of aroused animation fill the
air, he proudly, grandly marches up the sky--more grandly than any
monarch who ever trod the world's stately palaces and commanded the
homage of a prostrate throng. Even thus we fondly believe our dawning
will brighten into perfect day.
Even thus the sun of our consummated civilization will rise and shine.
The hues that beautify and not the heat that withers will be in his
glow. And on dissolving storm clouds of a bitter bloody past, he will
paint the rainbow of an abiding pledge, that government of the people,
for the people, by the people shall not perish from the earth.
The war for the Union, with all its majestic pageantry, is a thing of
the distant past. But its events have plucked the shining years they
gilded, even from this wondrous century, and molded them into a beacon
for ages yet to come. Let veterans rejoice in their honorable relation
to those events, and cherish with pride their sacred recollections.
Among these recollections is that of the contracted habitation,
grander in its humility than a palace imperial, which domiciled a
patriotism that was stainless and a heroism that was sublime, the
useful, modest, unappreciated Shelter Tent. It went with the heroes of
the war for the Union, through all their vivid experiences, as they
marched and camped and fought and conquered. They were the heroes of
the war, the heroes of the age.
They marched through deep wildernesses and across rough mountain
ranges; through stony paths that grilled their ankle bones, and
freezing creeks that chilled their shoulder blades with a glacial
emulsion; through fruiting farmsteads with broad avenues of maple,
beech and oak; through beckoning orchards reddened for the clutch of
hungry hands.
They marched through burning sands or stifling limedust white as
shredded alkali; through shoreless mud, black, yellow, red or gray,
tough, tender, slushy or plastic, but always tenacious as Arabic gums.
They marched through settlements of frowning, hostile, alienated
countrymen, with a dagger in each frown and a stab in every stare,
toward the embattled hosts of a rebellious confederacy fiercely armed
for the conflict against right and light. They marched through
ignorance and barbarism and instruments of cruel bondage; through the
snap of the lash and the sizz of the branding iron; through writhing
iniquities and paths piled high with iron chains; through city streets
and country roads; through horrid prison pens, o'er bloody
battle-fields, past pyramids of skulls,--up to the shining heights of
fame.
They camped in cottonfield and canebrake; in groves of magnolia and
myrtle; in still forests where jack-pots were juicy; in flowering
suburbs where sweet hams blossomed in the smoke-house and fat turkeys
ripened in the open air; on the levees of murmuring rivers and the
shores of the tossing sea.
They camped on plantations and left them desolate, where their
devouring camp-fires and their patriotic appetites wrought piteous
ruin through wide landscapes of fertile plenteousness.
They camped in shelter tents of microcosmic cut and altruistic design;
in huts composite, whereof logs, brush, mud, boards and straw in
varying proportions furnish the picturesque materials; or, tentless,
hutless, houseless, lay exposed to visits from alleged pearly dew and
so-called crystal raindrops, winked at all through the long
night-watches by the shimmering stars.
They camped in barracks grimed with the smoke and smear of previous
occupants, who departing left behind them sociable swarms of their
closest friends, ready to extend from every crack and crevice an
incisive welcome; in bastioned forts, constantly exposed to imminent
explosions from burrowing enemies, hilarious in undiscoverable tunnels
far below. They camped with controversial comrades loaded on all
topics from justification by faith to the cremation of garbage; with
comrades wearing periodically the outward and visible signs of an
inward and spirituous exhilaration, to whom all paths of glory lead
but to the grass, and whose nocturnal slumbers yield a resonance with
terror-smiting combination of college yell and Indian war-whoop.
They camped unwelcome amid prejudices and hatreds inveterate; amid
revilings incessant and intense; exposed to sneers in which the curled
lip of beauty impinged against a nose sniffing with scorn; but they
camped to stay, and they dispensed with welcome, as with other
comforts and luxuries multifold. The swelling chorus of their war
songs rent the sky, like the long, loud shout of jubilee which rises
when sundry millions of citizens, who have not dined regularly under a
revenue tariff regime, have tardily come to their senses, and voted
for three square meals a day.
Their morning drum-beat belted the continent from the Atlantic to the
Rocky mountains with one continuous strain of joyous reveille. Their
evening dress parades were a spectacular divertisement, impressing on
daily thronging thousands enlarged views of the power and dignity of
invincible America.
Their bugle calls ring through the air to-day awakening in our hearts
echoes tuneful as the song of triumph on the lips of cherubim.
They fought the aged, ancient mildews of a hideous past, and fused one
whole new, glad, golden century of effort and aspiration into a short
four years of matchless achievement. They fought against grievous
error for the eternal truth, with a snow-bird-on-ice coolness, a
Scotch-Irish firmness and the zeal of a cuckoo congressionalist.
On land and sea they fought the battles of humanity and posterity and
an immeasurable destiny. They fought giants who out-bunioned Bunyan,
and antedated Dante--veritable giants of the pit, with thorny tongues
and blazing eyes, welded Apollyon and megatherium. They fought against
bayonets and bullets; against grape and shell; against howitzers and
columbiads; against turrets and torpedoes; against sabres and carbines
perversely aimed at their most vunerable points; against breast-works
and rifle-pits bristling with sharpened steel. They fought across
enfiladed valleys hissing with hot death-bolts and red with volcanic
wrath; up rugged hillsides crested with flames of hell.
They overcame armed rebellion and won a glorious peace. They conquered
those who tore down the flag, and they lifted it to a peerless
exaltation, where earth's admiring peoples may draw inspiration from
its radiant splendor.
They gained a victory so consummate, so complete, so irrevocable, so
incontestable, that they condoned rebellion, and cordially welcomed
back the culprits to a share in governing the nation they had fought
to destroy. They conquered slavery with its multiples of horror. They
conquered ignorance and hatred and oppression, and opened all the land
to the sunbeams of modern enlightenment.
They conquered navies and armies, generals and admirals, seaports and
citadels and capitals, senates and cabinets and presidents.
They conquered deathless fame for their grand pantheon of heroes, and
garlands dewy with the freshness of a fadeless love for unnamed
millions who wore the loyal blue.
They conquered the hearts of generations yet to come, to whom their
suffering and sacrifice have given the priceless heritage of noble
deeds and an undivided country.
They conquered states, and built around the regenerated nation a
rampart of freedom, so high, so strong, so steadfast, that it may
proudly bid defiance to a hostile world.
Grand as was their heroism, noble as were their deeds, the Union
soldiers have little patience with the rhetoric of war-boasters which
have caused nearly as much suffering throughout the country in recent
years as the melodies of "After the Ball is Over," or "Over the Garden
Wall." Some of this rhetoric is over-ripe, like the new school of
fiction, in other cases it pumps beautiful incidents from a deep
capacious imagination, painfully void of veracity. But at any rate no
untoward vauntings proceed from this unconsidered trifle of that
epoch, neglected proletariat of tabernacles belligerent, the fleered
and flouted Shelter Tent.
To historians with the lenses of judgment in correct focus, its
functions in the splendid totality of achievement were by no means
unimportant, although hitherto almost wholly unacknowledged. A
war-scarred relic of it now, even if covering Carlyle's "most
shriveled, wind-dried, dyspeptic, chill-shivering individual, a
professor of life-weariness" (a tramp), would be more thrilling to the
eye and heart of patriotism than a dozen shining granite monuments
raised to commemorate forgiven but unforgetable rebellion. This is
the reason for these tears.
Tattered and blackened but serviceable still, type of much else
whereon we might perhaps with gain philosophize, the humble but
priceless Shelter Tent was borne to the rendezvous by glad warriors
returning in triumph, and legally mustered out. The war was ended; its
work was done. No further seek its usufruct to discern. Its career was
as tame as a typewritten love-letter. The receipt of a depot
quartermaster was its sole and all-sufficient obituary.
Vanished from the receding perspective of our experience is the
Shelter Tent--vanished from sight, but precious in memory forever.
With it went the golden age of the republic; with it went our
comradeship of trial and danger. After it came the new heaven and new
earth to our redeemed, regenerated country. It has gone. And already,
for more than half the soldiery of the grand army of the Union, it has
been replaced by that low, green canopy whose curtain never outward
swings.
DRESS PARADE
IV
Any scheme of war which omits the stately ceremonial of Dress Parade
from among its essential elements is scandalously unsymmetric. The
military science is of pre-classical antiquity, its roots shattering
the sarcophagi of Cadmus, and Darius, and Ptolemy, and Tubal
Cain--penetrating even the caves of the troglodyte and the gravel-beds
of the trilobite and the saurians. Ripening ages have at last
disclosed the imperative demand of a frequent assembly and orderly
arrangement of troops for show and inspection just as the evolution of
a parson requires the cultivation of orthography, etymology, surplice
and orthodoxy.
The problem as to who put down the rebellion, hitherto more recondite
than that of the precession of the equinoxes or of the invention of
the kindergarten, and infinitely provocative of type-written rhetoric,
has at last been solved! It was the boy in blue, his mother, and the
girl he left behind him. Only the first had or could have the right to
vote; the others had the higher right to be excused from voting. But
all were in the conflict, and each furnished a demonstrable quota of
heroic endeavor which crystallized into grand achievement. The first
did the fighting; the second did the praying; the third supplied the
inspiration.
The first effort of a regiment at observance of the tactical symposium
termed Dress Parade marked an era in its annals which was always
thereafter recurred to with prickling sensations at the roots of the
hair and a revolving propensity in the pit of the stomach. How it was
ever accomplished, endured, and survived was a mystery fathomless as
the craft of a Christianized and deodorized savage.
The component parts of this approaching cosmorama may, with profit,
be inspected separately.
The enlisted recruit, only a fortnight removed from the fresh milk and
feather beds of home, is already jaundice-smitten, until the white of
his eye shows quite golden-roddish and sun-flowery. In his aspect we
discern the wisdom of one who is seventeen years old for the first
time, and duly appreciates the fact. In his liver, quinine is already
wrestling with calomel for the supremacy, even as in his soul
remembered moral precepts are already summoned to mount guard against
the wiles of sin. He is sugared o'er with the pale cast of
virtue--stern in his rectitude as the senator who has never betrayed a
trust. His black eyes duly sparkle in aesthetic harmony with his curly,
coaly hair, as he warbles new-fledged patriotic melodies with fervid
sincerity. And he views the imminence of experience in human carnage
with the blind insouciance of a political party that is being led
through a slaughter-house to an open grave.