sergeant decorate his flapping sleeves, the agonies of his
self-consciousness are unutterably intensified. His picturesque,
variegated and altogether incomprehensible strut, is positively
unique. His awkwardness spreads and sprouts and amplifies and
ramifies. To witness his embarrassment is enough to break the heart of
an orphan. His tendency to do the right thing at the wrong time and
wrong thing at all times may be predicted with the precision of an
exact science.
His responsibilities are enormous; his perplexities are terrible; his
woes are innumerable; he is dejected, afflicted, tormented. He is
helpless as a lawyer hurling maxims of abstract justice ruthlessly in
the face of evidence. He is a non-commissioned officer. That is to
say: an unquoted quota; an unenumerated numeral; a non-existent
existence; not an officer at all!
The lieutenants, with authority varying inversely as the square of
their bumptiousness, are loud in their pretensions as the howl of a
defeated candidate who has fallen outside his breastworks. Mrs.
Solomon in all her several hundred glories was not elaborated like one
of these. Invincible Chicago, with the biggest and tallest Masonic
temple in the world, by thunder, is not so proud. The triumphant
statesman who has evolved a barley schedule that will put the robber
barons of western Iowa to open shame, is no more inflated. The
congressman who has exposed a rival's political armor-plate,
honeycombed with blowholes, is less exultant. State linked to state,
in goodly fate, in mart and mint and mine; in rolling plain of golden
grain or toss of plumy pine--none of these could fabricate a more
colossal national glorification than these imposing subalterns, with
ravenous tools of butchery girt on their semi-erect forms, and
fiercely fretful lest the rebellion should be suppressed before they
could debouch upon the ensanguined scenery.
The captain is big with the fate of empire. He has dwelt upon the
agonizing spectacle of his beloved country bleeding at every vein, not
to mention the carotid and celluloid arteries, _et cetera_, until he
has accumulated an amount of frenzy which only blood of a highly
oxygenized quality and in most generous libations can ever expect to
satisfy. The candidate with a separate and distinct set of views on
all crucial questions for each county in his district may pass muster
on the civil arena, but this centurion is vehemently in earnest. He
has supped on a thousand horrors--remember the number.
His eye is one gleaming chrysolite. His lips are pink and luminous,
dripping phosphorescent formulas in characterizing the assailants of
the flag. His mustache bristles with fury like the rays of an arc lamp
shooting pulsations of glow into unresisting darkness. His nose sniffs
battles from afar and threatens direful death in each resounding
sneeze. His brow is knit into knots of perplexity by chasing tactic
combinations which canter at will through the vasty thought-clefts of
his gray matter, foreboding a fatty degeneration thereof. His fervid
soul thirsts for the hour when he shall lead his eager men to regions
where bounteous crops of glory are harvested semi-monthly from
valor's fertile fields. No pent up Schenectady contracts his grand
ambition. But his torch is illuminative, not strictly conflagrational,
after all.
The major and lieutenant-colonel blush bright crimson with the burden
of unwonted dignities. These bucolic ex-potentates from outlying
precincts, cross-road lawyers, perhaps, of the pig-replevin,
breachy-steer class, are limp supernumeraries in all this busy
ebullition. Marvel not that they mutter unprintable ideas as they pass
along. Each has now a clawing consciousness of his approximation to
the infinitely little--the cube root of nothing. Each has squandered
sixty dollars, the savings of a lifetime, in the purchase of the
prescribed habiliments.
Now both find themselves eclipsed by a colored sport among the
on-lookers, who displays a loud check suit and screaming scarlet
necktie, enameled white shoes with black tips, and tall white hat
swathed in a broad black band. Suppressed and quenched they stand,
half-daft, with a glimmering recognition of their own marvelous
inutility; nerveless as the ecclesiastical victim of Christmas
generosity who has seventeen turkeys, in various stages of
decomposition, lying on his back porch.
But the colonel! Great son of Mars, swathed in fire and thunder! Every
sublime and momentous prerogative of this illustrious occasion finds
its prescriptive focus in his person. Lucifer, son of the morning--he
will rise to the occasion or break a nerve in the effort! Lifted by
approved, unchallenged primacy above all mediocre surroundings, he
stands wrapped in the rampant amplitude of his own perpendicularity.
His dignity is frigid as the icicles on the fateful blizzard's beard
in those frosty northwest winters when the coyote ceases yelping and
the gopher is at rest. His serenity can calmly smile at Satan's wrath
and force a frowning fraud. He speaks an imitation West Point idiom
with the Tippecanoe accent, and his voice rivals in resonance the
venturous wild-fowl honking high in air. His mental endowments have
never been enervated by book gluttony and lesson bibbing. He is no
patent process product of enlightened educational methods. He is a
symmetrical outgrowth, so accepted and recognized by all, including
himself.
Physically and intellectually he looms and glooms and towers. On him
all glances are centered; toward him all thoughts are stretched; for
him all hearts palpitate. Hector arming for the siege of Troy was
boy's play in comparison. The embryo soldiery regard him with pride;
admiring citizens look on him with poorly concealed reverence. He has
already trimmed his corns to fit a major-general's shoes. Consequently
his shoulders stiffen with pardonable arrogance; his gaze flashes
soul-satisfaction in radiant smileful beams, and the ginger is hot in
his mouth.
These are the ingredients out of which, in the alembic of his genius,
the adjutant, perspiring like a wedding guest come to celebrate the
climax of a happy disaster, must fuse a Dress Parade. His task is
difficult as that of teaching a war ship how to swim. These are the
bristling units, which, when he swings his commands around and over
them, will submit their centripetence to his awecompelling
centrifugence. They are flexible as a rubber currency, that can be
expanded and inflated at will, if handled with care. But in the end
they will stand approximately aligned, ready to skip on light
bombastic toe, to wheel and whirl, to march or halt, to strike or
slay.
Let not the drum major, gaudy as a calico cat, and his melodious
cohort, be forgotten. This cohort may be composed of small boys
executing Yankee Doodle with variations on snare drums and whistling
sticks, or of fluffy adults, agitating the atmosphere with resonant
trombone and shrieking piccolo. That is largely a matter of natural
selection,--that is to say, of accident. But it is always obtrusive as
a mourning costume expressly designed to advertise a quenchless woe
and save expenses generally. And it is always marshaled by a fierce
brobdingnag mounting a tall bearskin shako, and twirling a
nickel-plated besom staff with the dapper legerdemain of a
sword-swallower.
This so-called "band" is as imperative in the saturnalia of Dress
Parade as a demijohn in an Iowa closet. In that province water that
contains only 32,000 microbes to the cubic inch has been
scientifically approved as a beverage--provided just enough brandy is
added to take the cruelty out of the water. Without the band, parade
would be a piebald abstraction, unthinkablest of impossibles. With it
obstacles vanish and everything bursts into buoyant feasibleness and
stem-winding accuracy, wrapped in the indwelling beatitude of
conscious grandeur.
Music hath charms to smooth the savage breast. The reason why I can
not tell. In truth, strange to say, there are many other mysteries
connected with our mental operations and inspirational impulses which
are equally insoluble. The processes and boundaries of emotion in the
soul of a Wyoming senator, when her back hair comes down in the midst
of an eloquent peroration, are inscrutable and unfathomable. The bill
for an act entitled an act to amend an act is likely then to lose its
place on the calendar. But as a rule, the processes and boundaries of
thought are immutably conditional. Its formulas were petrified in
Aristotle, for man, with all his amazing progress in science and
inventions, still abides a little lower than the angels, his goods
never quite up to sample. The intellect pauses at a distance from
ultimate truth, dimly gleaming through the hush of a large gloom, and
painfully cries for external help.
Explosions often result from suddenly injecting thought into a vacant
mind. Some syllogisms are fallacious as a decoy watermelon stuffed
with paris green. The imagination may roam uncurbed through infinite
realms, but reason is horizoned by an adjacent pale over which it can
neither leap nor soar. Beyond this boundary philosophy can not direct
man's tottering steps; further his unblazed path will lead into the
vagaries and discords and peopled torments of lunacy, unless he
permits faith to begin where reason ends. When a venerable pundit,
formulating huge installments of lexicography, assures you that he
knows it all, be careful where you repeat the statement. Tell it not
in Gath; tell it to the marines--but break it gently, cautiously, or
by the beard of the prophet you will find small credence.
Necessary as it has been, dominant as it has been, military talent is,
after all, one of the lower forms of genius. It is not conversant with
the highest or the richest intellectual pursuits. It may exist to
perfection deficient in profound and liberal thinking, in imagination
and taste, in the noblest energies and inspirations of life.
Hugo says that at Waterloo each square was a volcano attacked by a
thunder-cloud; the lava fought with the lightning. Their employment
demands none of the finer fibers of intellect or loftier aspirations
of the soul. Even the "business" statesman of well recognized
shrewdness and well advertised piety, entrusted with cabinet
portfolios on the theory that public office is a private usufruct, is
likely to tread the higher realms of intelligence with more certain
footsteps than the Wellingtons or Jubal Earlys of bellicose
notability. And Susan B. Anthony insists to this day that the little
affair between her younger brother Mark Antony and Cleopatra has been
grossly exaggerated for base political purposes.
Parade differs from review as camp differs from campaign. The one is
solemnity, the other is vivacity. Positive parade, comparative review,
superlative battle, are the three degrees of comparison in war's
activities. They are respectively tableau, melodrama and tragedy of
systematic warfare. As ivory must germinate in the elephant's trunk
before poker chips can materialize, so parade and review must antedate
the battle agony.
Parade discloses the proficiency of a command in decorum, alignment
and manual of arms. Review and inspection test its skill in evolution,
as well as in equipment, accoutrement, care of weapons and general
efficiency. Battle brings out all the qualities which drills, parades,
reviews and inspections have developed or exhibited. During parades
and reviews the officers come to the front; in battle they go to the
rear. This accounts for the seeming mystery that so many still survive
to tell the tale, and to tell it in such bewildering variety.
Daily Dress Parade being enjoined explicitly by regulations, becomes
per force a vested right of citizen observers, and the periodic
irritant of lethargic soldiery. But its first dainty freshness, before
a state of lethargy has supervened and suppurated, threatens the
maddening frenzy that drowns all sorrow in ginger ale. Its occurrence
then brings whimsical complications equal to that of sweetening a
whisky ring with a sugar trust; mad alternations of hope, elation,
trepidation and horror; a synthesis like few!
That two and two make five is a mathematical preposterosity; that
early experiments in Dress Parade should be a success is a military
ditto, with extra emphasis on the antepenultimate. Let the heathen
rage and the plutocrats imagine a vain thing! Here is a seriousness of
facetiousness that would discourage a comedy star in full apogee.
As the fateful hour draws near, dim premonitions of coming
divertisements rapidly multiply. Dress Parade is about to materialize,
and the air is electric with expectancy, as when Corbett recognizes
the belligerence of Persimmons, hires a typewriter, and opens
hostilities in due form. Indications of the advent of an event worthy
the delicate touch of Bjornstene Bjeminison's poetic fancy, are
discerned. Matrons and maidens cluster and flutter and twitter athwart
the designated color line. The matrons are superb, and the maidens are
about to become historic--they are the girls who are to get left
behind.
Accompanying them are their attendant male civilians, disgruntled as
an oldest son who has ceased to be the only child by a large majority.
They feel like a bunch of shop-worn lower-case ciphers just ready to
be edited into the hell-box. They are keenly self-conscious of total
eclipse in this martial splendor's plethoric incandescence. The
rippling tee-hee of maidenly merriment rasps roughly on their ears,
provoking wrath in the collar. Their cheerfulness matches that of a
quarter of beef on its journey from dissecting table to chill-room.
Along company streets, redolent with intoxicating fumes of bean soup
and loyalty up to date, manifest signs of preparation obtrude.
According to the accepted congressional code, nothing succeeds like
success, when one is successful in succeeding himself. Even the
demagogues, who love the people in stump speeches at ten dollars per
speech, sometimes achieve success of that kind.
A genuine military success requires painstaking method, as these
premonitions indicate. There are glimpses of toilet, glimmers of gun
barrel, suggestions of ablution, flashes of bayonet. There are dashes
of shoe-polishing and hair-brushery--mad wrestle with a Paderewski
growth of foliage, here and there. A tent fly lifts and the process of
creating a contemptuous curl of mustache greets the penetrating
vision. Bright steel rammers gleam in the glare of the giddy avenue.
Advance individuals, nervously premature in completed canonicals,
appear; then squads, groups, platoons--entire companies. Other things
may be late and worms may chew them, but the scythe and hour-glass are
always on time. So is Dress Parade.
Companies are aligned and files are counted off. Sergeants, surcharged
with a rude, luminous unshaken faith in the republic, tumble
stumblingly into their positions. Corporals, sensitive as the bulb of
nerve fiber at the end of a cat's whisker, are given the merry hand
with a marble heart.
The captain, already disliked by the enemies he has made, flings
himself to the perilous front. Ranks are right faced and levant
longitudinally, at a modified gallopade, toward the aforementioned
color line. Here, after miscellaneous entanglements, unequaled since
cable and trolley emancipated the mule from tram car servitude, a
measurable coherence is secured. The companies form by some sort of
incomprehensible intuition of incidence, on four or five alleged
"guides." These stand with inverted muskets and quaking knees, a soft
spot in the head and a hot spot in the cheek, robust delineations of
despairing imbecility. Their terrors are tremendous, reminding one of
that sweetly solemn village hour, when curfew rings and small boys
hunt their haunts.
The colonel is now suddenly disclosed. He has dropped, unseen,
presumably from the propitious heavens, into his allotted station,
some forty paces in front of the center. At any rate, he is there. And
if I had a hundred dollars--as I had once, though I may never look
upon its like again--I would wager it all that he wishes he were
somewhere (anywhere) else.
He is one of those lingering men whose minds go off with a wet fuse.
Like one dazed, he gazes amazed; and a gaze at him is worth the whole
cost of admission. He wears a little bunch of whiskers on his chin,
and his nose has the rising inflection. His warlike air and attitude
are prophecies of the day when Greece shall give Turkey a basting. He
poses statuesque, with folded arms, head aslant, one hip elevated and
both legs trembling. His make-up rivals that of a special Chinese
envoy with the yellowest of jackets and peacockiest of tails. He
carries a frown over the bridge of his nose that portends deep
concealment of valuable information as to his own consequence, unknown
to the world at large. That frown, however, is only borrowed for the
occasion; at heart he is humble as the Chicago aristocrat who has
squandered the price of a car of pork in the purchase of a bogus
Venus. He poses, with arms folded _a la_ Bonaparte over his Napoleonic
stomach. He poses like the last erect relic of a forest, colossal,
leafless, lifeless and sublime. He looks proud as the weary mechanic
greeted on his front porch at eve by a shining galaxy of posterity. He
has a right to be proud; he is the colonel. Bring forth the royal
diadem and make him a present of it.
Meanwhile the adjutant is not idle. Far otherwise. His duties are
complicated as the new quadruplex telegraphic system for the
transmission of string-fiend fakes. He imitates the gyrations of a
cyclone funnel in his delirious attempts to frame one geometric
tangent out of ten miscellaneous arcs, with unassimilable _radii_. His
processes resemble a lurid, revolving nightmare of St. Valentine's day
in the morning. He foams and fumes; he shouts and signals; he
gesticulates; he genuflects; he perambulates. He pleads for correct
formation as pallid Maryland corn fields plead for rain and
fertilizers. His voice is softened by the sweet, feathery fluff on
his upper lip, but it reaches far. His perplexities equal those of the
man who went down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell among hotel
runners. But as in the cruel abattoir the fated bullock glances at the
sticker's cold, callous, calculating eye and bows to the inevitable,
so the willing, though awkward, soldiery yield at last to the
adjutant's persistent insistence. He finally establishes a distant
resemblance to the shortest space between two given markers. The
markers introvert their marks and fall into desuetude--and the mummery
is duly inaugurated.
First the music must sound off. It is of the class that has functional
relations with insomnia. Sad was the unlucky Kansas farmer who lost
his wife and his best yoke of steers, all in the same week. Sad is the
beatified spirit of the deceased alderman when he finds that the
streets of heaven are already paved and there can be no rake-off. Sad
is the fond wife, rummaging her husband's pockets, when she discovers
through her tears that the coins are copper. But sadder than any,
saddest of all, are they who by direful fortune are condemned to the
slow torture of listening to a moulting military band. Yet it is an
inescapable adjunct of Dress Parade.
Now the rear rank must "open order," a strategic maneuver performed
with a ludicroterrific multiplication of blunders, appalling to the
articles of war and fatal to the flintiest risibles. Each witness
wears the face of one who drinketh vinegar unawares. More calisthenics
by the adjutant. More heaving of anchors and straining at cables and
hoisting on beam ends along the phalanx line. For the jolly mariners
of the prairie, fresh from the delights of home, with its pealing
bells and magic spells and appetizing smells, are trying to box the
compass of spectacular punctilio, with odds dead against them in
generous installments. Their timidity gives one a pain; their temerity
makes one tender to the touch of sarcasm. Marvel not that our infant
industries require protection while they are teething.
Then follow, in startling, swift succession, certain decisive events,
decisive as the mystic, matrimonial rite which makes two mortals
immortal.
The adjutant faces toward the left flank, shoulders his tinseled
pinking iron, and sets his teeth firmly, almost defiantly.
He starts forward in an energetic amble, a melancholy glitter
weltering in his optic, and his features bathed in gloom whose
darkness might be bottled up and sold for Tyrian dye.
He trots trippingly down to the axis of oscillation; wheels suddenly
to the right; charges madly on the perplexed, expectant colonel
standing promiscuous as aforesaid; thinks better of it halfway, and
halts suddenly.
He whirls entirely around at imminent risk of summersaulting.
He explodes vociferously: "Shltr-r-r Hr-r-rms! Pr-r-rsnt Hr-r-rms!"
That is all, but that is enough. The result is astonishing as the
Rhode Island tenderfoot's first experiment with Montana wrath; but on
the whole it is satisfactory. This is a free country, even when
poverty stands with one ear at the telephone waiting for the stately
steppings of an advance agent of prosperity. This is a free country,
where the Italian may drink wine if he likes, even though the
Norwegian may prefer alcohol. This is a free country, where, in the
bright lexicon of sage brush statesmanship, there is no such word as
surrender. This is a free country, where once in four years the voters
may, if they see fit, commit all their political Jonahs to a school of
whales with broad throats and stout stomachs. This is a free country,
all the way from sterile Vermont to California, land of rose-bloom and
gold dust, where striped candy ripens every month on the woodbine and
new oranges can be dug before Easter. This is a free country, and each
soldier on his own terms, in his own good time, obeys the adjutant's
command. In the aggregate, every movement in the manual of arms, and
many more, are attempted; in the ultimate, the entire battalion gets
there.
But the methods and fashions in which nine hundred fire-arms are
supposititiously tendered to all whom it may concern, are of
bewildering midway plaisance variety. They are void of monotony, like
a symposium on the cause and cure of panics. The absolute negation of
simultaneousness is an abiding charm. Variety is spice; better thirty
days of Texas than a palace in Cathay. When St. Louis contributes
melted snow of a very dark color to swell old Mississippi's limpid
tide, a waiting delta down in the gulf reaps the predestinated
benefit.
The adjutant, reckless of addled brain tissue, wrenched spinal marrow
and sprained leg-ligaments, whirls once more. His heels come down with
a recoil that would jar the rivets from an iron-clad. Patience! noble
adjutant (and gentle reader), the prancings and rotatings approach a
terminal. We near a period such as that when the last cork has been
popped at a wine supper and the bill must be settled. Grudge not the
details that gild the gliding moments as they go. He whirls, and, with
smart salute of naked saber pointed toward the deathless stars,
confronts his commander. It is a moment big with fate. We are reminded
of the memorable occasion when Cleopatra clasped the asp and perished
dramatically.
The adjutant confronts the colonel and salutes him to the best of his
feeble ability. Poor human utterance is inadequate at such an hour,
but he manages to stammer in propitiatory tone: "Sir! the parade is
formed!" Then, circling softly to right and rear of the rising
splendor, he subsides, succumbs, and is henceforth lack-lustrous in
this spangled pageantry. His part has been performed, and, whisper it
gently to the sighing zephyrs, his future function is merely to stand
at attention, like patience on a pedestal, grinning at grief.