Battery A had a mascot goat, and Battery C a Filipino kid, and
Battery D a parrot that could swear in five languages, but I guess
we were the only battery in the brigade that carried an old lady!
Filipino, nothing! But white as yourself and from Oakland,
California, and I don't suppose I'd be here talking to you now, if
it hadn't been for her.
I had known Benny a long time--Benny was her son, you know, the
only one she had--and when I enlisted at the beginning of the war
Benny wished to do it, too, only he was scared to death, not of
the Spaniards, but his old Ma! So he hung off and on, while I
drilled at the Presidio and rode free on the street cars, and did
the little hero act, and ate pie the whole day long. My! How they
used to bring us pies in them times and boxes of see-gars--and
flowers! Flowers to burn! Well I remember a Wisconsin regiment
marching along Market Street, big splendid men from the up-North
woods, every one of them with a Calla lily stuck in his gun! Oh,
it was fine, with the troops pouring in, and the whole city afire
to receive them, and the girls almost cutting the clothes off your
back for souvenirs--and it made Benny sick to see it all, him
clerking in a hardware store and eating his heart out to go with
the boys. He hung back as long as he could, but at last he
couldn't stand it no longer, and the day before we sailed he went
and enlisted in my battery.
He knew there was going to be a rumpus at home and I suppose that
was why he put it off to the very end, not wanting to be plagued
to death or cried over. But when he got into his uniform and had
done a spell of goose-step with the first sergeant, he was so
blamed rattled about going home that he had to take me along too.
He lived away off somewheres in a poorish sort of neighbourhood,
all little frame houses and little front yards about that big,
where you could see commuters watering Calla lilies in their city
clothes. Benny's house seemed the smallest and poorest of the lot,
though it had Calla lilies too and other sorts of flowers, and a
mat with "welcome" on it, and some kind of a dog that licked our
hands as we walked up the front steps and answered to the name of
Dook.
Benny pushed open the door and went in, me at his heels, and both
of us nervous as cats. His mother was sitting in a rocker, reading
the evening paper with gold spectacles, and I never saw such a
straight-backed old lady in my life, nor any so tall and thin and
commanding. She looked up at us, kind of startled to see two
soldiers walking into her kitchen, and Benny smiled a silly smile
and said:
"Mommer, I'm off to help Dooey in the Fillypines!"
I guess he thought she'd jump at him or something, for he had
always been a mother's boy and minded everything she said, though
he was twenty-eight years old and rising-nine--but all she did was
to draw in her breath sharp and sudden, so you could hear the
whistle of it, and then two big tears rolled out under her specs.
"Don't feel bad about it, Mommer," said Benny in a snuffly voice.
She never said a word, but got up from the chair and came over to
where Benny was, very white and trembly, and looking at his army
coat like it was a shroud.
"Oh, my son, my son!" she said, kind of choking over the words.
"I couldn't stay behind when all the boys was going," he said.
I saw he was holding back all he could to keep from crying, and I
didn't blame him either, as we was to sail the next day and the
old lady was his Ma. It's them good-byes that break a soldier all
up. So I lit out and played with the dog and made him jump through
my hands and fetch sticks and give his paw (he was quite a
RE-markable dog, that dog, though his breeding wasn't much), while I
could hear them inside, talking and talking, and the old lady's
voice running on about the danger of drink and how he mustn't
sleep in wet clothes or give back-talk to his officers--it was
wonderful the horse-sense that old lady had--and how he must
respeck the uniform he wore and be cheerful and willing and brave,
like his sainted father who was dead--all that mothers say and
sometimes what soldiers do--and through it all there was a pleasant
rattle of dishes and the sound of the fire being poked up, and
Benny asking where's the table-cloth, and was there another pie?
By and by I was called in, and there, sure enough, the table was
spread, and we were both made to sit down while the old lady
skirmished around and wiped her eyes when we weren't looking.
We had beefsteak, warmed-over pigs' feet, coffee, potato cakes,
fresh lettuce, Graham gems, and two kinds of pie, and the next day
we sailed for Manila.
Them early days in the Fillypines was the toughest proposition I
was ever up against. Things hadn't settled down as they did
afterward, nobody knowing where he was at, and all of us shoved up
to the front higgeldy-piggeldy; and, being Regulars, they gave us
the heavy end of it, having to do all the fighting while the
Volunteers was being taught the difference between a Krag-
Jorgensen and a Moro Castle. It was all front in them days--for
the Regulars! But we were lucky in our commissary sergeant, a
splendid young man named Orr, and we lived well from the start and
never came down to rations. The battery got quite a name for
having griddle-cakes for breakfast and carrying a lot of dog
generally in the eating line, and someone wrote a song, to the
toon of Chickamauga, called "The Fried Chicken of Battery B." But
I tell you, it wasn't all fried chicken either, for the fighting
was heavy and hot, and a good many of the boys pegged out. If ever
there was a battery that looked for trouble and got it--it was
Battery B! But we took good care of our commissary sergeant--did I
mention he was a splendid young man named Orr?--and though we
dropped a good many numbers, wounded, dead, sick, and missing--we
kep' up the good name of the battery and had canned butter and
pop-overs nearly every day.
Benny and I were chums, but nobody knows what that word means till
you've kept warm under the same blanket and kneeled side by side
in the firing-line. It brings men together like nothing else in
the world, and it's queer the unlikely sorts that take to one
another. I was so common and uneddicated that I wonder what Benny
ever saw to like in me, for, as I said, he was a regular Mommer's
boy and splendidly brought up and an electrician. Religious, too,
and a church member! But he was powerful fond of me, and never
went into action but what he'd let off a little prayer to himself
that I might come out all right and go to heaven if bolo-ed. Pity
he hadn't taken as much trouble for himself, for one day while we
were lying in a trench, and firing for all we were worth, I
suddenly saw that look in his face that a soldier gets to know so
well.
"Benny, you're shot!" I yelled out, dropping my Krag and all
struck of a heap.
"Shot, nothing!" he answered, and then he keeled over in the dirt
and his legs began to kick.
He took a powerful long time to die, and there was even some talk
of sending him down to the base hospital, the field one being that
full and constantly needed at our heels. But he pleaded with the
doctors and was allowed as a favour to stay on and die where he
was minded--with the battery. I was with him all I could, and I'll
never forget how good that commissary sergeant was, a splendid
young man named Orr, who always had a little pot of chicken broth
for Benny and cornstarch, and what he fancied most of all--a sort
of thick dough cakes we called sinkers. As luck would have it I
got into trouble about this time--a little matter of two silver
candle-sticks and a Virgin's crown--and Benny sent for Captain
Howard (it was him that commanded the battery), and weak as he
was, dying, he begged me off, and the captain swore awful to hide
how bad he felt, and struck my name off the sheet to please him.
There was little enough to do in this line, for it was plain as
day where Benny was bound for, and he knew himself he would never
see that little home in Oakland again.
Well, he got worse and worse, and sometimes when I went there he
didn't know me, being out of his head or kind of dopy with the
doctor's stuff, the shadow being over him, as Irish people say.
One night he was that low that I got scared, and I waylaid the
contract surgeon as he came out.
"Doctor," I said, "it's all up with Benny, ain't it?"
"He'll never hear reveille no more," he says.
I got my blanket and lay outside the door, it being against
regulations for any of us to be in the field-hospital after taps.
But the orderly said he'd call me if Benny was to wake up before
the end, and the doctor promised me I might go in. Sure enough, I
was called somewheres along of four o'clock and the orderly led me
inside the tent to Benny's cot. There was no light but a candle in
a bottle, and I held it in my hand and bent over and looked in
Benny's face. He was himself all right, and he put his cold,
sweaty hand in mine and pressed it.
"Do you know me, old man?" I said. "Do you know me?"
"Good-bye, Bill," he said, and then, as I leaned over him, his
voice being that low and faint--he whispered: "Billy, I guess
you'll have to rustle for another chum!"
Them was his last words and he said them with a kind of a smile,
like he was happy and didn't give a damn to live. Then the little
life he had left went out. The orderly looked at his watch, and
then wrote the time on a slate after Benny's regimental number and
the word: "died." This was about all the epitaph he got, though we
buried him properly in the morning and gave him the usual send-
off. Then his effects was auctioned off in front of the captain's
tent, a nickel for this, ten cents for that--a soldier hasn't much
at any time, you know, and on the march less than a little--and
five-sixty about covered the lot. There was quite a rush for the
picture of his best girl, but I bought it in, along with one of
his Ma and a one-pound Hotchkiss shell and the hilt of a Spanish
officer's sword; and when I had laid them away in my haversack and
had borrowed a sheet of paper and an envelope from the commissary
sergeant to write to Benny's mother, it came over me what a little
place a man fills in the world and how things go on much the same
without him.
I was setting down to write that letter and was about midway
through, having got to "the pride of the battery and regretted by
all who noo him," when I looked up, and what in thunder do you
suppose I saw? The old lady herself, by God! walking into camp
with an umberella and a valise, and looking like she always did--
powerful grim and commanding. Someone must have told her the news
and which was my tent, for she walked straight up to where I was
and said: "William, William!" like that. She didn't cry or
nothing, and anybody at a distance might have thought she was just
talking to a stranger; but there was a whole funeral march in the
sound of her voice, and you could read Benny's death like print in
her wrinkled old face. I took her out to where we had buried him,
and she plumped down on her knees and prayed, with the umberella
and the valise beside her, while I held my hat in one hand and my
pistol in the other, ready for any bolo business that might come
out of the high grass.
Then we went back to the field-hospital and had a look in, she
explaining on the way how she had mortgaged her home, so as to
come and look after Benny. I guess the hospital must have appeared
kind of cheerless, for lots of the wounded were lying on the bare
ground, and it was a caution the way some of them groaned and
groaned. You see Battery K had just come in, having had an
engagement by the way at Dagupan, and Wilson's cavalry, besides,
had dumped a sight of their men on us.
"And it was in a place like this that my boy died?" said the old
lady, her mouth quivering and then closing on the words like a
steel trap.
"There's the very cot, Ma'am," I said.
She said something like "Oh, oh, oh!" under her breath, and,
taking out her handkerchief, wiped the face and lips of the man in
the cot, who was lying there with his uniform still on him. I
suppose he had got it because he was a bad case,--the cot, I
mean,--and certainly he was far from spry.
"He's dead!" said the old lady, shuddering. "He's dead!"
"Orderly," I said, "number fifty-six is dead!"
The orderly bent over to make sure and then ran for his slate--the
same old slate--and began to write down the same old thing. I
suppose there was some sense to that slate racket, for with a
little spit one slate would do for a brigade, but it seemed a
cheap way to die. Then, as we stood there, another orderly came
gallumphing in with something steaming in a tin can. The old lady
took it out of his hand and smelled it, supercilious.
"What do you call this?" she said.
"It's chicken broth, Ma'am," he said. "That's what it is, Ma'am."
"Faugh!" said the old lady, "faugh!" and handed it back to him,
like she was going to throw it away, but didn't. Then we watched
him dip it out in tin cups and carry it around, while some other
fellers came in and carried out the body of the man in the cot, a
trooper by his legs. We went out with them, and, I tell you, it
was good to stand in the open air again and breathe. The old lady
took a little spell of rest on a packing-case; then she gave me
her umberella and valise to take back to quarters, and, rolling up
her sleeves, made like she was going into the hospital again.