A FLANK MOVEMENT.
In war and peace all people are afraid of a flank movement. General
Sherman, though he never quite found out what newspapers are for, _did_
discover that the Federal strength was in the enemy's flanks. In other
words, if the Confederate army had been finished off prematurely like a
pictorial cherub, he would have had nothing to punish. It is said to be
a dreadful strain upon a man's muscles to kick at nothing! In a railway
car a man is apt to be flanked by somebody--a small army of observation
in the rear.
Take a man who has a fine sense of feeling all over, and put two women
behind him--one woman thus located is comparatively harmless, but two
are a terror, for they can talk about you!--and he begins to wonder if
his collar is clean behind, and how he looks just back of his ears, and
whether a stray string, or something, may not be sticking up above his
coat, though he cannot remember that he ever had anything there to be
_tied_. Then he tries to remember whether he brushed his hair neatly
behind, in his haste this morning, lest he should be behind himself.
Just at that minute there is a coincidence; a little laugh from the
ladies on the next seat, and footsteps on the rim of his ear! It is
mid-winter, and it cannot be a fly. If he were only sure it was a
tarantula, he would be happy. They laugh again, and again that small
promenader. He _knows_ his head harbors nothing but ideas, and yet
a trespasser may have come from foreign pastures, for all that. He
wishes he knew--that he could see himself as "ithers see" him at that
particular minute.
Can it possibly be of the race that Burns discovered upon the woman's
Sunday bonnet? He dares not put his hand up, lest they should observe
it. He feels his ears grow red and warm. He wishes they would get hot
enough to scorch that creature's feet. Still those small footsteps. He
has heard, in his time, the tramp of armed men. It was sublimer, but
not half so terrible. Again that little laugh behind him, and rising in
his desperation he goes to the rear of the car, claps his hand to the
burning ear, and secures a single hair like a bit of a watch-spring,
that had coiled on the rim of the human sea-shell, and counterfeited
feet that his fancy built upon, as Agassiz built two-story monsters out
of a rafter or a rib that somebody exhumed and sent to him. And those
ladies had never seen him at all!
If a man could always have the world in his front, courage would not be
much of a virtue, if it _ever_ is. There are a great many worthless
things passed about as genuine. Now, that little Spartan scamp who
stole the fox, hid it under his robe, and let the creature relieve him
of his liver rather than be found out and lose the plunder, is handed
about with a label to him, as a sort of pocket-model of fortitude. I
dug it out of Greek when I was a boy, and was taught it was worth
finding. Why, he was nothing but a miserable little thief, that
couldn't speak a word of English! So, if courage is a virtue, the brave
little wren carries more virtue to the ounce than anything going. The
writer knows a public speaker who trembles as did the king who saw
something written on the wall, if he is compelled to pass through the
body of the house to reach the platform, and yet always faces the
audience with perfect self-possession. He has been known to flounder
through an unbroken snow-drift, and climb in by a window, simply to
avoid the flank movement that took all his courage out of him. When you
see a man turn a cold shoulder to a chilling wind instead of squarely
facing it, you may count him among the victims of rheumatism, and not
among the philosophers.