hearts beat like the ticking of French clocks made in Rotterdam by a
Swede. In the recesses of each chest, "boots and saddles" is sounded
at frequent intervals. But outward silence reigns, as when a young
woman, purple with throbbing timidity and expectant bashfulness,
stands before her lover, uncertain whether he will lisp his love, or
switch off to a side track and discuss the January thaw. Silence is
golden and toothsome and restful. But it can not last forever. It
breaks.
It breaks like a monetary stringency tapped with clearing-house
certificates. The colonel now looms, the crowning pride of all this
display. Behold, ye gathered multitude of non-combatives. Behold and
tremble! His sword of sharpness, gift from admiring neighbors over at
Goslin's lane, unsheathed after valorous struggles, swings clumsily to
a perpendicular. Excalibur's fit prototype, as emblem of authority and
fruitful of coming slaughters, is revealed. Hear, oh! post-office, and
give ear, all ye blacksmith shops. Great Mars, his son, has sway. Mock
him not! Madness that way lies, or worse. Cheer and the crowd cheers
with you; laugh and you laugh in the guard-house. Such being the case,
nobody cares to laugh. Napoleon called attention to the fact that
forty centuries were perched on the pyramids to umpire one of his
fights. More centuries than that are here to see and note.
And the colonel proceeds to make a few remarks. He is in a remarkful
mood, but his style is dry and sententious. He is not one of those
authors who swell the bowels of their books with empty wind. His
remarks are meaningful. At home he was chief in the rosebud garden of
oratory, but it is not his cue, on the present occasion, to get into a
wrestling match with reckless word-trippers. He does all the talking
himself. Spherical, sonorous vocables, the well-conned phrases of
command, roll out upon the quivering air, and smite the multitudinous
ear of this battalion with a startling sense of impotency. The
multitudinous arm reaches out in nervous effort at obedience. But on
divergent lines the effort doth its energy expend, and the results are
simply marvelous. Melodramatic entanglements and perplexities tread on
each other's heels, like candidates for patrimony at the obsequies of
a plutocrat. Errors grotesque as hippogriffs impinge on errors
plaintive as threnodies in minor E.
A woman of the impressionist school, who cooks in a chafing dish, and
prescribes reform ball costumes of high-neck gown, long sleeves and
mittens, is very appropriately registered from Boston. A school girl
in the same city wrote in her composition: "The boy thinks himself
smart because he can wade where it is deep, but God made the dry land
for every living thing, and rested on the seventh day." No calligraph
below the regulation Boston standard will suffice fully to portray the
errors and horrors of this Dress Parade.
The evolutions of Darwinism are therefore presumably to be
intelligently apprehended only by the Boston transcendentalist,
nourished on mackerel salted to the _n_th power, and wearing a baked
bean in his vermiform appendix. The evolutions and involutions of a
maiden effort at Dress Parade are incomprehensible as the ravings of a
salaried jaw-smith in a labor strike, who has burst into a profuse
state of prevarication as the rosy beer-froth mantles his sublime
cheek. True wisdom is best exemplified by a turtle withdrawn into his
casemate; even the overestimated he-goat is less occult and dignified.
The popular platform at Vassar is a free coinage of ice cream, 16 to
1, and a currency based on unsecured bonds of wedlock that have
defaulted their dividends would be unanimously spurned. On the western
frontier a presentable university can be set up with one bottle of
sulphuric acid, a four-foot telescope and two ball bats. In some
portions of the south a professor who boasts a bicycle kyphosis,
writes polysyllabic profundities in long-waisted chirography, and
combs his hair like John C. Calhoun, is impregnably intrenched.
Thus do educational standards pulsate and palpitate in different
sections of our beloved country. In China, where the grasshopper is a
burden and mice are legal tender, it is not so. The tests for a civil
service examination of candidates for concubine to the emperor are
alike in all the provinces. The Chicago board of trade operator, who
rises with the lark at 8:45 A. M., and five drinks later is ready for
business, scorns the effeminate chappie who had his dog's tongue split
in order to crease his pants. But in Chicago, where even the Goddess
of Liberty frequently requires a chaperone after dark, such things
will happen in spite of the most stringent police regulations. Besides
which they are mostly incompetent, irrelevant and immaterial. These
evolutions and involutions of Dress Parade are to be wrought out by an
incipient soldiery, which three months hence will be seeking the hen
and ham of glory at the red mouth of smoke house and chicken coop,
lucky also not to be subject to rigid inspection by a state
entomologist. Now they are intangible as the man in the moon,
ineffable as the man in the honeymoon.
Evolutions sometimes go backward. On the present occasion there is no
restriction--everything goes, as the young woman said when he drifted
slowly out of her life on a lumber raft. The evolutions are
meritorious in design and multifarious in execution; likewise in the
manual of arms. The flabergasted novices stand inextricable, like some
brittle Rosamond tangled in silken skeins to the queen's taste. You
may bray a crank in the mortar, but his wheels will still whirl. When
the irreclaimable faddist bestrides his foible, give him due latitude.
When the ambient air is full of ozone and things of that sort, look
out for thunder-storms.
When the 'prentice musketeer shoulders his arquebus and intimates a
design to charge bayonet, stand from under promptly. Delays are
dangerous. Iscariot with his twelve pieces of discredited coin folded
in his turban figured as a tight-rope dancer on the occasion of his
very last appearance on any stage.
Tasteless and intangible was the kiss that was prematurely discharged
in midair and never, never came. Even the joys of courtship suffer a
temporary eclipse when Johnnie is found behind the sofa. Exasperating
to a like degree is the humorous episode at which we dare not laugh,
yet can not die. It is alleged that rural homes decorated with
chromographic mottoes are largely responsible for the overcrowded
state of the paresis wards in our asylums. How much of the phenomenal
hereditary predisposition to recklessness which characterized the next
generation after the war was attributable to the enforced repression
of risibles at Dress Parade may never be definitely ascertained. This
much we know: When the safety valve is strapped down, boilers are in
danger. She who kindles fire with gasoline, and penetrates the
undiscovered country by that illuminated route, leaves few to pity and
none to praise. But the victim of an over-fermentation of merriment
has sympathizers numerous as the fashions of grandfather's hat.
When the young recruit, twenty per cent. pork, thirty per cent. beans,
forty per cent. patriotism and ten per cent. soldier, stands up to be
exhibited, and a score of his best girls, each compounded in five
equal parts of beauty and brightness, grace, gush and giggle, gaze in
ravenous, enraptured solicitude on the dreadful performance, with
their steel walls of restraint riveted tightly around them,--well, the
consequences are to be unquestionably counted in as a part of the
general havoc of war.
Meantime Dress Parade goes on. The evolutions and involutions continue
to revolve, until the tired recruits are threatened with serious
affection in the yellow pine district of the lumber region. The manual
of arms goes through all its ascensions and declensions, its
conjugations and calamities. He who would follow all its ramifications
must have a head on him like the learned pig. Arms are presented,
shouldered, ordered, right-shifted, trailed and held aport. Bayonets
are charged and fixed and clattered until their gleam threatens to
scream. No such confusion has prevailed since Lot's wife was
transformed into chloride of sodium. One third of the commands are
unintelligible; another third are incapable of execution according to
tactics; no two companies have been drilled alike; no three
consecutive soldiers perform the same antic at the same time. No
movement is attempted that does not yield mixtures of grief, drollery
and exasperation, sufficing for the most miscellaneous requirement.
Meritorious attributes sometimes crop out in unexpected places--many a
man conceals a bruised and bleeding heart beneath a porous plaster.
Humor and drollery develop. Still the routine goes on, nominally
monotonous, but in reality miraculously diversified.
[Illustration: ... _No two companies have been drilled alike; no three
consecutive soldiers perform the same antic at the same time_]
Arms are trailed, right-shouldered, presented, ordered; bayonets are
fixed, unfixed, or transfixed; rammers are sprung and imaginary
cartridges are subjected to supposititious mastication. Over and over
again, in bewildering diversity of succession, are the orders
inaccurately given and confusedly executed, until the colonel's
martial rage is seemingly appeased. Man wants but little here below,
while woman wants many things and wants them all marked down. Both man
and woman ought to find in this notable performance a maximum of
_quantum suf_.
The perfunctory reading of orders; the reports of first sergeants; the
grand spectacular advance of the officers, might each inspire a modern
society poem, printed on linen paper with ink worth a dollar a pound.
The final dismissal of parade; the departure of companies to their
respective quarters--these are mere routine. They are essential,
perhaps, but dull, tasteless, flameless as unleavened sanctimony. It
is vanity and vexation to be born with a silver spoon in one's mouth,
if there is nothing in the spoon.
Throughout its bellicose career, when occasion permits, the regiment
renews its daily practice of this imposing observance. Leaf by leaf
the roses fall; day by day the snare-drums call. But practice makes
perfect. Within a twelvemonth after muster-in the alert, alive and
agile volunteers will have become so facile in their exercise that
every motion is pivotal and simultaneous--a thousand with a single
joint who hear and move as one. The veteran reverts to his plebe camp
experiences even as the aged grandsire recalls the sorrowful coffee
and sad biscuit of early matrimonial days. The halo of romance
encircles them still!
Every man to his trade, cries the bigamous cobbler, with shell-bark
resonance, and tenaciously sticks to his last. Every crank to his
whim, every fool to his folly, says common-sense, with some slight
conscientious twinges. When uncle Silas comes from South Squam, and,
for the first time, confronts the dizzy delights of a gay metropolis,
there is danger in the air. Look not upon Monte Carlo when it is red;
shun humbugs as you would shun a land title based on love and
affection. The events we commemorate happened, to all intents and
purposes, on a different planet from that now occupying our orbit.
If ever a Dress Parade of hobbies, a review of sham or an inspection
of human nature could be displayed, there are grounds for a suspicion
that serious complications would ensue. They would equal the ferment
from an accidental mixture of gin, gingerbread and sauerkraut, prime
standard products of the early Knickerbockers and first exports from
New Amsterdam. Bulwer says: "Beware of the poor devil who is always
railing at coaches and four; book him as a man to be bribed."
More than thirty years ago, for the last time in the volunteer army of
the Union, the welcome call, "Parade is dismissed," rang along the
attenuated line of some lingering battalion, and it dissolved into
history. Parades, marches and battles were finished. But victory was
assured; its results are embedded and embalmed in the nation's
splendid destiny.
It is an inspiring thought that this destiny opens broad and bright
before us, and we need only be faithful to our trust to ensure a
realization of the fondest dreams of the heroes, saints and martyrs of
the olden time. Unrolled around us lies a continent, clothed with
verdure as with a garment, heavy with its stores of hoarded wealth,
all reserved for us in virgin purity and freshness since earth's
creation morn. Our race is inheritor of the best blood, the best
energies, the best principles, the best talent, that have illumined
and vivified the human family through all its glorious past.
Here, then, if we and our descendants are true, in this enlarged and
beautified Eden, are to be evolved all the grand possibilities of
humanity. Here increasing prosperity is to bring increased virtue;
increasing intelligence, increased power; increasing culture,
increased happiness; increasing freedom, increased nobility. Here the
swarming millions yet to be, molded by free institutions and
universal education into a refined and homogeneous race, multiplying
their material comforts by now undreamed-of physical appliances,
adorning their homes until each family shall dwell, self-centered, in
a world of beauty as in a shining sphere of crystal, and warming in
the sunshine of God's presence as they grow in moral stature nearer to
His throne,--here the coming millions will advance to the millennial
fruition promised as the goal of earthly hope and effort.
THE BOYS IN BLUE GROWN GRAY
V
There were no giants in those days that tried men's souls and stored
their bodies with unpensionable ailments. Giants, mostly apocryphal,
fought battles single-handed in periods of antiquity now remote and
malodorous. The last samples perished some centuries ago, painfully
regretted. Their spears were rust, their clubs were dust, their souls
were with the saints (we trust) long prior to 1861.
The men who put down the slaveholders' rebellion were mostly boys. It
is estimated that the soldiers of the Union averaged only nineteen
years old when the roar of that first cannon broke on Sumter's walls
and echoed down the aisles of time, besides shattering a large
invoice of miscellaneous crockery. No such burden ever before fell on
the youth of any era; no such imperial manhood was ever before
developed in a single generation. Greece molded countless heroes of
her own, and has thrust her hand into every mass of mortal clay that
has been fashioned into beauty or power or glory since the days of the
demigods. But Greece can boast no more perfect heroism than that which
made our golden age illustrious, conspicuous, lurid as a trolley car
in a thunder-storm, for all ensuing ages.
The recruit of 1861 was of the human various species so dear to the
articulating frenzy of Mr. Venus. He was intensely human yet various
as life's multiform phases in this resplendent hemisphere. He was a
farm boy, perhaps, fresh from the white sheets, and fried chicken, and
sweet cream, and angel cake of his ancestral roof, with no experience
more thrilling than that of the local press and pulpit arising as the
voice of one man to celebrate the production of some abnormal
cucumber; he went to town to see the parade, and, vowing he would
ne'er enlist, enlisted. He was a store clerk, skilled in pounds, pints
and prints, with a thin top dressing of Latin, and a silvery Minnehaha
gush of gaiety in every motion. He was a student with columns of
logarithms in his head and a theodolite in his stomach; conscientious
as a juryman sworn to bring in a verdict according to the law and the
lawyers' speeches. He was a mechanic, swart and grim, with steps so
energized with mobility that when he walked the pavements rolled and
rocked beneath him like waves of the sea.
There were howling swells in that period, but he was not of them.
Reared in the bland atmosphere of plowshares and pruning-hooks, he had
no taste for the big orgies in which they reveled. He was not a fast
young man, nor did the fast young men, as a rule, make good soldiers,
or soldiers at all. Their furore was not the inspiring sentiment of a
war for liberty. Their recklessness was not bravery; their wild
natures accepted no yoke of discipline. These fast young men traveled
rapidly, because their road was all down grade. They were the same
then as now, the same yesterday, to-day and next century--worthless
and fruitless, first, last and forever. Each successive five years
brings a new generation of them, as the novices of five years
previous, worn out and burned out by dissipation, disappear over the
divide and enter that sulphurous enclosure, that stockade of horrors,
where the fires of torment are fed with their festering tissues, and
the towers of Tophet re-echo the shrieks of their tortured souls.
These howling swells, these fast young men, these debauched, debased
and dissolute youths, these devotees of the world, the flesh and the
flowing bowl, had no part or lot in the sacrifices of that heroic era.
The average boy of '61 was of pure metal and exalted worth. The glint
of his eye reflected the stars of the flag, and a prophecy of
Appomattox was written on his brow. Into the white chambers of his
soul only such things could enter as affiliated with the guests
already cherished there--his mother, his sister, his sweetheart and
his God.
In the alembic of stern discipline and relentless strife he and his
comrades were fused into that homogeneous, glorious host who, on five
hundred crimson fields from Wilson's Creek to Bentonville, at a salary
of thirteen munificent dollars a month in depreciated greenbacks, put
the love of life's joys behind them and, throwing their souls into
their bayonets, rushed to the flaming front, careless of wounds or
death if only they might help to final victory.
What we call 1861 was not a year. It was history changing front; a
cycle dying, an era born. Ignorance was still shaking himself by the
hand pompously, after the manner of his species, and saying to
himself: "Go to! I am lord of the bailiwick as aforetime; I will bind
and stack and thresh as of hoariest yore." But knowledge was looming;
information was coming to the front with a seafaring hitch to his
trousers as one who had traveled far; even the professional reformer,
who talks dialectics while his wife toils sixteen hours a day to
nourish his soaring soul, found auditors. But knowledge did not loom
to an adequate altitude or permeate to a sufficient degree of
prevalence. Else had no Southron dared promise himself to whip the
people who had invented and built up and managed the great material
enterprises of the nation--or desired to whip them. Ignorance
fluttered around recklessly until he singed his ostentatious whiskers
in the flames of the pit; yea, more,--until he was blistered to the
eyebrows with scorchings of the everlasting bonfire. Where ignorance
is bliss, politics degenerates into irredeemable idiocy and ineffable
slush; the campaign of mutual delusion goes on and on, the whole day
long, the whole summer through, the whole year round; the oracle is an
imitation statesman, whose head was cast in a heroic mold, but the
jelly didn't "jellify;" his clientage is the adult male population of
an infested village, whose howling need is a dog-killery. Under such
leadership popular illumination is a slothful, discouraging process.
The modest, uncultivated mule is liable at times to reverse the
accepted formula, and put his best foot backward. The half-savage
conductors of an orthodox Afro-American cremation in Texas typify an
equally marked social retrogression.
It is, as a rule, futile to preach predestination to people who are
not in the four hundred, but a general movement for the dissemination
of knowledge is effective in tearing away ignorance, as the rich soil
of Iowa is ripped up the back with a gang plow. With a due allowance
of school-houses in the south forty years ago, the slaveholders'
rebellion would have been impossible, just as in the prosperous,
progressive American republic of to-day with ten million depositors in
her banks and twenty million children in her schools, a successful
assault on intelligence and prosperity would be impossible. Ignorance,
as we have stated, fluttered recklessly near the scorchings of the
bonfire. Whereupon knowledge achieved a popularity unprecedented since
our first ancestress risked for its acquisition the fairest prospects
of her distant and inconceivably multitudinous posterity.
During ten years next succeeding the war, its loyal survivors were
habitually called, half in affection, half in honor: "Our Boys in
Blue." Even those who had hated their cause and mourned their success
conceded the fitness of a sobriquet which exalted their uniform to the
dignity of a moral attribute, and tinged their classification with the
hue of their trousers. It was Plato who said: "The brave shall be
crowned. He shall wed the fair. He shall be honored at the sacrifice
and the banquet." This was the era of the wedding, the barbecue, the
"present arms" to a phalanx of angels--as was eminently fitting.
The women of '61 were not the wailing watchers and tearful
lint-scrapers of a too current tradition. They were soulful,
heart-strong heroines, the swordless soldiers of the Union.
Lint-scraping and bandage winding were minor episodes. Their work was
many sided as a prism, with every angle reflecting a radiant
intensity. And all the ladders of grace that led from bloodiest
battle-fields straight to the bending heavens, were built up, round by
round, from the piety and devotion of intrepid womanhood.
The Boys in Blue were rapidly and happily and most appropriately
mated to the noble girls they left behind them. One of Napoleon's
marshals exclaimed when dying: "I have dreamed a beautiful dream." To
the Boy in Blue, suffused with blushes as the compliments rained on
him, both war and peace were chrysanthemum visions, soft, rosy and
spicy. The compliments were well earned and welcome; welcome and
wholesome as a thoughtful surgeon's timely prescription in the cold
drizzle of a night march, when he proffered his flask with:
"Gentlemen, you need a tonic; leave a drop for me!" Even the chastened
copperhead hissed no expostulation; he simply folded his Nessus shirt
around him and lay down in baffled schemes, his only punishment being
an enforced allegiance to the proudest flag and grandest country the
world has ever seen.
When ten years more had lent distinction and distance to receding
perspectives, the title changed to "Our Gallant Veterans." The
asperity of opposition had softened; the respect of friends had
deepened. There was tenderness in the accent which pronounced the
words and in the sentiment which inspired them. All recognized that
wherever a surviving soldier stood, there was a sentinel of liberty.
The Veterans came to the front in every sphere of activity, with the
nerve that stakes a royal flush against a marble synagogue. They
performed their full share of every-day work, and they rose to high
positions in the state. They generously divided the honors, even
turning out early in the morning to give the devil his dews. This was
comparatively easy, as the exposure of the crime of 1873 had not then
upset nearly everything, nor had the new woman come, constantly
provoking controversies with the antagonistic sex.