Chapter V: The Boys in Blue Grown Gray 218 (2)

But the Mule sleeps, noiseless and motionless. Into that steep, deep sleep what dreams might creep! But no! No visions of to-morrow's big load and high check now vex his royal ribs. No colic phantoms disturb his illusion of combing his fetlocks in golden stubble--fit function for his underrated merits. No nightmares come hurling cold hailstones at his sinless head or murdering "Sweet Marie" in Z minor around his protesting ears. So he awakens invigorated and steps out into the purple dawn of next day, fresh as the cold oaken bucket that dangles no longer in the moss-covered well, and chipper as Sancho Panza's Dapple--oh! speechless, incredible Mule!

Were not comparisons odious we might unreservedly affirm that he was fully capable of the zeal displayed by one of our major-generals who, on or about August 29, 1862, rushed toward the sound of John Pope's cannon at a hold-the-fort-for-I-am-coming velocity of six miles a day. We may furthermore safely claim for him devotion at least equal to that displayed by another major-general, coincidently negatively pregnant, who drank from the same canteen and simultaneously telegraphed to Pope from Alexandria, proposing to reinforce him with every wagon in camp if he would send back cavalry for an escort!

There is a period in every battle when the bravest soldier would donate liberally to the missionary cause for trustworthy assurance of scathless emergence. The most valorous among us are at times conciliatory and pacific as an intimidated husband just emerging from a domestic cyclone cellar. Human nature is not perpetually keyed up to the Marco Bozarris pitch. Marvel not then that the astute Lincoln, when informed that a general and forty Mules had been captured by the enemy, put on that far-away, lodge-of-sorrow look and plaintively remarked: "I am sorry to lose the Mules." Generals, brave to the point of recklessness and beyond it, could be made as easily as bonanza Christians, who join the church by typewriter and are baptized by telegraph--but Mules had a specific, ascertainable value.

The Army Mule's market value or cost to the government ranged from one hundred and fifteen to one hundred and fifty dollars. This price was established when he was first brought in and exhibited to all intents and purposes as an article of merchandise. He was then largely occupied in attempting to conceal exclusive knowledge of certain secluded green pastures; winking slyly to himself in the excess of his cunning, all unaware of the multiplex miseries stored away for him in the immediate future. The price was generally satisfactory, for the service sighed for him. But the Mule did not receive the money. Far from it! A part of it went to his loyal owner, so called. We all knew him. He was suave as a Scotchman who has adopted the manners and customs of civilization. He was cheerful as the radiant old circuit rider who preaches to a mixed congregation in a boom suburb, from a text found in lot 3, block 12, of Timothy's second subdivision. In every crisis he was first to stay at home and readiest to volunteer his moral support in putting down insurrection.

After selling a string of Mules he would walk the streets for a week filled with rum and gladness, bragging in his balmy periods over the keenness of his sharpness. The remainder of the purchase price, as was currently suspected, went into the pockets of the purchasing quartermaster, clothed in white samite, mystic, plunderful--popular only within restricted areas. None of it went to the Mule. A woman never looks well in a fault-finding habit; a man never looks well when detected in prevarication; therefore let us tell the truth: None of it went to the Mule!

Parenthetically we may remark that this type of financial injustice has been perpetuated, until the hind quarters of the speechless, unspeakable survivors would be excusable for rising in their might to protest emphatically. If the shoe fits spike it, says the farrier; if the conscience twinges one or more of us here present, it is perhaps not yet too late to reform. Nearly a thousand men, mostly teamsters, buglers and hospital stewarts, toothless but terrible, have been pensioned since the war for lameness caused by the kick of a Mule's hoof iron, while no Mule has been pensioned for lameness, spavin, ring-bone, wind-gall or glanders--no, not one. The speechless, rheumatic Mule, in all his army moods and tenses, acquired no stiffness of the joints materially differing from the old civil-service, barnyard variety.

Why then differentiate? Punched by the wagon-tongue or tripped by the trace chains, when the breeching was fractured on a down grade, the exposures to rupture or fracture were incessant, with no experts in attendance to splice the splints. These are facts which no profuseness of classic allusion to pearly brooks and flowery meads can obscure, when the sour cream of his experience curdles in his soul. In gushing eras of reconciliation large populations seemed extremely bent on pushing things to the whimpering point; the people who were wrong were with surprising unanimity almost ready to forgive the people who were right and kiss again with cheers.

In those days the widow of Stonewall Jackson was gallantly escorted through Boston Common by General Benjamin F. Butler, Governor of Massachusetts. And she proclaimed with tears in her voice and patriotism in her heart, that she found in this star-eyed hero an elegant gentleman as well as an orthodox believer--then immediately applied for a patent on her discovery. (Some men, like happy dreams, are too good to be true). Surely the day of jubilee had come. But even at that time undying animosities and misconceptions prevented an award of due credit to the crippled, superannuated Army Mules. Little wonder that so ungrateful an epoch was mostly given over to hybridizing chrysanthemums and breeding chappies.

And the end is not yet. "Loyal" owners, seedy and snuffy, are still collecting exaggerated pay from a long enduring government for unnumbered myriads of mythical Mules alleged to have been confiscated. The bronzed Kickapoo matron with soiled fingers, straining maple syrup through the family heirloom blanket for the St. Louis market in the forests of southern Iowa, has almost ceased to be a picturesque, typical feature of our civilization. But the war claimant still lingers, multiplying his lost Mules periodically, as the years glide by,--while the just claims of the unquestionably loyal Mule himself are neglected with studious shamelessness. Many persons are said to think that this is not just, but we may perhaps be pardoned for the remark that it is a long time between thinks.

Take notice, however, that not all Mules can establish unquestioned loyalty. Some of them yielded to the strain on their principles and went over to the enemy, like a rural dupe who is so charmed with the accomplishments of the shell-game adept that he resolves to embark in that line of business himself. Loyalty and treason were largely matters of education and environment. Even the rival little liver pills are quite the same in their essential, fundamental ingredients; one is aloes, rhubarb and antimony, while the other is antimony, aloes and rhubarb; either is equally offensive to a refined and cultured mucous membrane, and both are warranted to go through by moonlight, errors and omissions excepted.

A veracious war writer has recorded that in May, 1865, the Confederate army consisted of Kirby Smith, four Mules and a base drum, moving rapidly toward Texas. The general's proudest hope then was that he might be allowed to eke out his future anonymous existence in the solitudes of Mexico; the chattels were joint and several assets, like a plug of tobacco in the hands of a threshing crew. In war the defeated faction must accept the quartermaster's brand, "Inspected and Condemned," without a murmur, even as in politics he is four times disarmed who lets his barrel burst. These bonnie blue Mules could be readily classed as disfranchised and denationalized. They would clearly come within the fourteenth amendment unless they have been amnestied by the statute of limitations.

At any rate, the vivid historic pageant ranks next in interest to Saul of Tarsus riding the Mule's father into Damascus, where he proceeded to mulch the nursery stock of a new faith and dig a few grubs out of the roots. The boy with a big apple in his mouth, that he can neither spit out nor chew nor swallow, is a distressing spectacle; the twentieth century southerner apologizing for his deluded secessionist ancestor will command a broad clientage of respectful sympathy.

The Army Mule's strategic value was recognized throughout the whole corrugated surface of the Kenesaw region, and everywhere else within the lines of active operation. It was tersely expressed by General George H. Thomas when he said: "The fate of an army sometimes depends on a linch-pin." Poetry without a motif is held by experts to be deficient in verve; an army without a train long as the exordium of a professional spell-binder was supposed to be impossible. The science of electrocution is in its infancy, but the death-dealing corset has been industriously slaughterous for three or four generations.

Erroneous solutions of the transportation problem are responsible for much needless sacrifice of life and treasure. The army train was a baffling understudy. Six patient, faithful Mules were attached to each creaking big blue wagon, with a high, white canvas cover. Thirteen wagons were, during the first two years of the war, allotted to a regiment of infantry; six to a battery of artillery. Such campaigning emulated the luxuriousness of a hundred-acre corn-field where every ear-muff is made of silk. (P. S. It was subsequently abandoned.) One hundred teams occupy a mile of road. Thus an army of seventy-five thousand men are followed when marching by a wagon-train eighteen miles long, hauled by Mules.

A broken linch-pin or king-bolt or hame-strap near the front of this lumbering procession would bring the whole succedent line promptly to a halt. Strategy at once impinges against a nonplus. The campaign comes to a dead stand with a dull thud. The florid, inductive teamster, with a hare-lip, is pondering profoundly the subjectiveness of dinnerlessness. He is a hectic, hungry, hairy man, with whiskers on his wrists; in addition he is deliberate. He repairs the damage very deliberately. He refreshes himself, meanwhile, with snatches of ancient melody, rescued from the deluge with Shem and Ham. Also with frequent volleys of Enfield curses and Gatling blows, discharged at his speechless, unoffending Mules. Luridity of impiety is a _sine qua non_.

The mild, ethereal wickedness of that fossilized beechnut relating to the dam by a mill site, pales its ineffective glow. It is usually the dictate of wisdom to leave a wild-eyed cannibal in undisturbed possession of his warpath; equally so to be very sparing of sneers at another man's joss. Consequently the driver's amiable diversion is seldom interfered with. When all damages are repaired the procession moves on.

Then begins again the long lumbering creak, to continue in melancholy monotony until another linch-pin breaks or buckle parts asunder. Eighteen miles of tortured wagons roll on and on; white-arched, weighty; relics of a thorny, stormy past, yet pregnant with an illimitable future. They bristle with tent-poles, trail tangled tent ropes far behind, and exude knapsacks, haversacks, canteens, drums and drum majors at every pore. They are festooned around and beneath with clinging mess pans, pendulous camp kettles, and the like differentiation of iron-mongery. If the weather is fine this creak and grind and rumble goes on and on, with monotonous, mechanical steadiness, subject to accidents as aforesaid, until the tuneful, sagacious Mule sings the long roll, as he instinctively scents approach to the preordained place of encampment, when welcome night draws nigh.

This is the poetry of transportation, jolly as a cake-walk, comfortable as a smoking jacket, easy as reducing the labor question to an exact science by the acceptance of a generous salary as walking delegate. But when rains descend and floods come, the scenery shifts; wagons, muleteers and quadrupeds are indiscriminately plunged into diluvial quagmires, fathomless as air and shoreless as the gulf-stream. Then the liquified turnpike spreads over the valleys and yellow cascades roar down the defenseless ruts.

Then the climax of helpless wretchedness arrives, always fatefully tumbling on the articulated anatomy of a hapless, cadaverous Mule. Beneath him even chilled-steel agony can not go. He gathers in all its multiplex horrors, computed on the Utah plural family plan. He would win a Columbian Exposition medal for the most picturesque collection of miseries--picturesque, variegated and altogether astonishing. They overwhelm him like a bather submerged in sea waves twenty feet high, each weighing a thousand tons, half brine and half sledge-hammer.

No man can adequately realize what magnificent folly he is capable of until he sees his own old love-letters set forth in the cold, cruel print of some hideous newspaper. No man can fully appreciate the faithfulness of our devoted animal co-workers until he sees a crucial test applied. The quenchless, marvelous Mule emerges from the mire and clay, with a whooping-cough wheeze, driven to preternatural exertions by redoubled curses and quadrupled scourgings.

His step is quick, short and grasping. The spirit inherited from some remote Hambletonian antetype flames in his nostrils. He rings a fire alarm, hoists the grand hailing sign of distress, and defiantly dashes his toe-calks through to hard pan. He rushes down the high bluff, over the muddy flat, across the cold stream, up the steep bank--lashed, lathered and spurred. With a whisk of his tail that scatters bullets of mud he springs to the tremendous task. His body is squat to the earth at times, but his ears always point starward. Every muscle hisses with the heat of the strain and every nerve is burning; his whole frame quivers and smokes as he bursts into supremest effort and brings his freightage to the goal, or dies in his tracks, a speechless, unsung martyr to the cause. No burial, no monument, no obituary.

To the Army Mule in camp, if anywhere, rest, rations and felicity should come. A surplus of excitement is injurious to the nerves, but life wholly without an atmosphere is in peril from suffocation. Rest is alleged to be the only unfailing antidote to Dr. Bright's widely advertised kidney complaint. Camp is recreation in army service as courting is the play spell of the soul. The farmers in politics, dedicated to a maximum of talk and a minimum of toil, need no proclamation from the governor bidding them hold a fast from work in order to enjoy a feast of discussion.

The free-lunch rounder, with pretzel crumbs on his mustache, loves above all things to sit easy at his inn. Even the emancipated lady prays earnestly for deliverance from the fatigues of the conservative, innocent, purely platonic schottische. Consequently no blame can justly attach to the worn and worried Mule for standing ever in readiness to fall in with propositions for honorable repose. Beautiful are his anticipations of a good time in camp; beautiful as a statue of hammered brass, and as hollow. The hollowness results from the fact that no reckoning was made of the hare-lipped despot at the other end of the picket rope.

Ten pounds of grain and thirty pounds of hay is the daily allowance. Some pie-plant professor of an agricultural institute, with a marked-down set of artificial eyebrows hung at oblique angles to his nose, long ago figured it out on strict mathematical principles of animal economy. The court records it and the law doth give it. Thrice happy is the beast that gets it; happy, but rarer than Indians with side whiskers and ideality. Straw, stalks, tent pins and cracker boxes are his more reliable provender. These are reinforced with stray bites now and then, when he can chew himself loose, from a private's laundered and lively underwear drying on a limb, or from the cold shoulder of a corporal of the guard.

In the sweet, serene night watches, when slumber's chain had manacled us, roving Mules may have rubbed noses while hatching a bleak and dark conspiracy to massacre the brigade and plunder the forage train. But it came to naught; possibly for lack of leadership. There was no relief for the oppressed, defrauded Mule. No satiating food for him, savory as Lyonaise potato softly tinctured with onion. No lollipop confectionery for him, melting in the mouth like painted butter. Empty is the nosebag, even as to plebeian oats; empty as the wit of irreverent soldiers who josh the chaplain and gibe at the Mule.

An agricultural inquirer once wrote to Horace Greeley asking if guano was good to put on potatoes. The busy editor replied that it might do for men whose taste had been vitiated by tobacco and rum, but for his own eating he preferred gravy. This was the cranberry tart retort of the illustrious journalist, with a tough undercrust of misconception, it is true. The condiments for the Army Mule's camp banquet were not of the spice spicy. He has clear memories of a voracity which created wide vacuum in sundry greenswards, and played havoc with corn cribs manifold. The voracity remains, but the swards and cribs are far, far away.

At spasmodic intervals a sympathetic warrior, having burned all the top rails of an informally confiscated fence, will toss the juicy and edible bottom rail to the pleading, omniverous Mule, residuary legatee of camp-fires. This is good average food in times of internecine strife, when so simple an article as pie is a precious prerogative. But such well-flavored morsels are too uncertain for standard sustenance. For shockingly protracted periods, he stands unfed, neglected, receiving all suggestions with a squeal and a kick, while the zephyrs disinfect his fur. Pending which, stark, grim skeletons of all the barked and branchless trees within stretch of his tether attest the final result of an attempt to adjust his Minnesota appetite to his Andersonville rations. If watered twice a week he may vote himself lucky; he has not even the surfeit of a teetotaler's wassail, where water flows like wine. "A Mule feels chilly in July," says the Talmud; if his temperature depends on the supply of internal fuel, there is limited space for astonishment.

Meanwhile an unsanctified teamster, with red hair and hare-lip, blushing with innocence until his whiskers singe in the heat, enjoys the encampment episode to the uttermost. In Constantinople public opinion is gauged by the prevalence of nocturnal conflagrations, and the number of hanged bakers decorating the street corners next morning. But in camp there is no concentrated public opinion sufficiently intense to mete out due retribution to the profligate castigator of the fodderless, thirsty Mule. He sleeps on ample bedding of good sweet hay, and has large store of gerrymandered corn to exchange for toothsome luxuries. His tobacco is of the costliest brand and he defiantly blows the froth of numerous beers from his blasphemous lips. He carries a full purse and a steady nerve; also a bomb-proof conscience void of offense. Bad medicine, he!

The jocundities of life in camp we may gather _ad nauseam_ from the romances of some of the professors of freehand drawing who enlisted as army correspondents; but for purposes of authentic history these narratives are worthless as second-hand champagne corks. The jocularities referred to have no interest to the solemn, imperturbable Mule save when he is an object of their malevolence. Then they are more interesting than enjoyable. The swell imbecile carries an umbrella under his arm through crowded streets until its tip is garnished with the eye of some unfortunate fellow wayfarer; the man who loses the eye fails to see the point of--the joke.

The Mule is not much of a joker himself; but as a victim of practical jokes, fine, funny or chestnutty, he has become widely celebrated. His resentment of these preposterous hilarities, all of which are on the _passé_ social code of roller rinks, has caused much of the reputation for waspy temper which now attaches to him with the tenacity of a bachelor girl to the state of single blissfulness. Temper changes with status, as was ascertained by the enthusiast who originally named his _fiancée_ Revenge because she was sweet, but now that she is his wife calls her Delay because she is dangerous.

The city man who would own a farm should have a good income well assured elsewhere, for it will certainly be needed. The foolhardy individual who proposes to play tricks on a mule should be well buttressed with sound accident policies. Beware the irritated quadruped! Look not into the red mouth of a wild Numidian lion; touch not the royal Bengal tiger's remotest whisker-tip; avoid the little black bull with an eye like a razor's edge; make no experiments with the terminal facilities of the speechless, inscrutible Mule!

His ways are past finding out; his kicks are incalculable, inexplicable, incomprehensible. He sometimes allows patience to pile up in ridges on his neck, while the battalions of wrath are debouching from all quarters into his hoof. Then the eruption breaks out with torpedo suddenness and with an energy of fury that rivals the deafening roar which smites the aggregated ear of the magnificent metropolis, when fire invades the wholesale district.

Blessed is the nation whose annals are uneventful--America is safe with fifteen million children in the public schools and three thousand citizens to one soldier. Happy is the bride whom the sun shines on whether matriculated at Ognotz or merely captivated at Topeka. Joyous to the weary mechanic the picnic of his labor holiday, with its lemonade, its orations, and its other things that lull to peaceful slumber. Halcyon to the Army Mule are monotonous days in camp, when they bring surcease of torment as well as toil; red-lettered if therewithal be brought, by rare concatenation, such plethora of long forage as drowns vicissitude in bright beatitude. In that case he rounds out radiantly and within the cycle of a very few days develops beyond recognition. His protrusions disappear like the vanishing lines of a mineral lode. His rumps accumulate fat and his girth expands with a facility that is amazing. His eye takes on a new gleam and his bray acquires a fresh intonation.

Moreover, he is speedily transformed into a bold aristocrat. He cultivates style and assumes airs of conscious superiority equal to the contemptuous sniff of a Fifth avenue dog who has smelled some chance passer-by two or three grades below par. His future may be uncertain as a Spaniard's veracity or a Frenchman's paternity; but he lives in the glad and glowing present, with the nonchalance of a Russian official hunting for fragments of the czar by torchlight, after a popular demonstration.

Of the Mule in battle, lean is the record's exploitation. There is little danger that his renown in that line will ever be subversive of our liberties and other luxuries. Right is forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the make, as of old. But the placid, benevolent Mule never takes up arms against either party--our quartermaster's returns of uncounted thousands "lost in action" to the contrary notwithstanding. It even seems difficult to secure credit for such service as he actually rendered. His occasional sporadic work in artillery teams is wholly forgotten. His frequent spurts to the flaming front with ammunition wagons is entirely ignored.

A common, peaceful explosion of powder magazines at home not only shatters all the windows in the neighborhood, but also shatters the faith of people for miles around in the doctrine of resurrection of the body. So the peaceful nature of the Mule is fatal to any accumulation of reputation bubbles, where bayonets bristle and saltpeter burns. Were he ten times the tin-clad child of havoc that he is, the florid, hare-lipped arbiter of his destinies would see to it carefully that, barring accidents, his opportunities for responding to long rolls should be few.

The Chicago socialists tendered an olive branch to the police made of gas-pipe and charged with nitroglycerine in a highly persuasive state of concentration. But when the red and riotous fume of the bomb-throwers' breath permeated the haymarket like a pestilence, no army Mule mingled with the medley of frowzy trousers. No more do we hear of him at Shiloh or Champion Hill or Cedar Creek.

For offensive purposes the Mule was, in general, harmless as a United States frigate or a divinity student at a bean-bag festival, or the ghost of a goose, white, downy and clamorous. The valedictorian of the last class at the Keeley cure, permeated with a variety of virtuous joint and several resolutions, could scarcely be more docile. Even the reproachful Confederate smokehouse could not shake its gory padlock at the stainless, unimpeachable Mule--although he carried a jimmy equal to most emergencies, he could, as a rule, readily establish an alibi. When fodder is really in the shock, and frost is ready to be cleft from pumpkins with a snow-plow, then such free tubers as have been produced in sweet charity's name on the Pingree plan should be harvested without procrastination; delays are perilous at that season of the year. The evil effects of the shock, however, can be minimized, by feeding the fodder, in advance, to the harmless, appreciative Mule. Forewarned is four times armed, or more.

Non-combatants and impedimenta compose the rear of an army when it is in action. Here assemble great drinkers of alcohol, and vast eaters, who measurably justify Germany's subsequent discrimination against the American hog--all of whom let concealment like a chinch-bug prey on their damaged cheeks, their necks, meanwhile, being given over to the ravages of the army flea. Here in secure serenity mobilize numerous excellent subjects for the romantic young woman who yearns for a lovely debauchee to reform. Here congregate cooks, commissaries and sutlers--this last with a sage-brush tinge of disappointment in his aspect, and a Jenness-Miller cut of trousers on his limbs. Here recreate skulkers who simulate heroes, and sneaks in the garbage of soldiers, all cumberers of the ground, like a prophet gone to seed in his own country. Here gather men of Trilby feet and mighty thirst, who are riotous with repartee, but intensely hostile to all manner of soft beverage; also cowards, inveterate as the upward tendency of tartar emetic; moreover, quartermasters' clerks, spouting bloodthirstiness like a congressional candidate, or some other gas well; likewise, here in the rear, are mule wagons, mule pack trains, mule teams, mule drivers and Mules.

When retreating or outflanked the order is varied and rear becomes front instanter. Then unthinkable confusion reigns. A financial catastrophe brought on by forty-cent wheat and ten-cent statesmanship looking at facts through a long-distance binocle, is bad enough. An explosion of the swear tank for a thought distillery in the higher realms of journalism is even worse, if possible. But when a Mule dam breaks, the thundering reverberation of its tumultuous hoofs is a resonant forecast of pandemonium rampant. Vain and futile then all ardent aspiration for such quiet as ensues when the wicked cease from borrowing and the female elocutionist soars and bores no more! Our cavalry out-posts were broken doses of soothing syrup for the nervous flanks of the infantry, and often stampeded the front line by their too precipitate retrogression.

A stampede of Mule teams to the rear had all the _spirituel_ features and picturesque complications of an arrangement of tariff schedules on the principle of local option. Attempts at control were hopeless as piloting a national campaign when the American voter is on the rampage. It was a chaotic conglomeration of convulsive uproar, sufficient to whirl down any hope of glory with a sickening slump. The gentleman from out of town, who, in spite of conspicuous warning, blows out the gas, makes his exit from sublunary strife in enviable quietude. No such privileges are extended to the end man of a Mule rush. In exclusive social circles, the dress may be a dream, and the bill a nightmare, but in the mixed companionship we are contemplating, this impromptu display is a veritable delirium tremens of undelineated horror.

Frederick the Great shouted to a fleeing battle-straggler, "Wretch, wouldst thou live forever?" and paralyzed him. The unabashed army teamster, with a sliced upper lip and hair æsthetically matching his sorrel Mule, sprinting along the broad highway of wrath, pitched downward at an angle of forty-five degrees toward perdition, would have admitted the soft impeachment, and pursued his flight, lashing, blaspheming. He may have been, at home, as consistent a Baptist as ever yoked a steer, but for this occasion all rules are suspended by unanimous consent, and precedent tumbles headlong. The coincidence of a florid girl and a pale horse is always exasperating, at least to the girl; a hurried retreat in the presence of a menacing enemy, naturally exasperates to full pitch of desperation the belligerent boss of the nimble, obedient Mule.

In numberless miscellaneous episodes of a military sphere, the Army Mule was marked high as to deportment. Though of somewhat irregular character, even verging at times on the diabolical, he emulated the standards of the officer and the gentleman. We can afford to mix a little sentiment with our matter of fact. We can afford to drop a tear when the object is worth it. We can afford a note of eulogy under like circumstances, even to an Arizona cayuse fattened on bunch-grass to the rotundity of a prickly pear.

Yes, certainly, business thrift is commendable, but when it comes to crossing the lightning-bug with the honey-bee so that the latter can work at night, we draw the line. Sentiment aside, there is a measure of truth in the averment that the Army Mule and the army bean put down the rebellion. The dancing diplomat, with his twisted comprehensions and his addled complacencies may not appreciate it. Such an one, having never associated with the speechless, unspeakable Mule, nor, indeed, had any legitimate business transactions with him, may possibly still assert that the lion is king of beasts. Far from it! The lion will serve as a freak, children half price; but for steady days' works, for genuine _aplomb_ and musical dexterity of wide longitudinal range, the courteous, dignified Mule was preeminently peerless.

To hospital and guard-house, Siamese bugbears of honorable service, he was a stranger. It was never necessary to detail a fatigue squad to police his ears. The worthy chaplain, fresh from green pastures of civil life, where he fed the juicy lambs and clubbed the tough old rams of the flock, found no occasion for reproof to the silent, orthodox Mule.

No venial dereliction ever subjected him to stoppage of pay or reduction to the ranks, even when the fodder that he longed for never came. No court-martial, reeking with pungent odors of staple and fancy sutlers' goods, ever met to arbitrate his predestinated destiny. You might tie his tail like a pretzel, or pound his bray in a mortar, yet would not his serenity depart from him. The proneness of his voice apparatus to go off at half cock unfitted him for crooked works of strategy--he could never be relied on either to "lie" in wait or "steal" on an enemy. How gratefully he turns with a maple-sap thaw in his aspect, when his neck has been stripped of the blistering harness; how joyously his eager nostrils sniff the forage from afar. Oh! grateful, melodious Mule!

A zoological riddle, offspring of amalgam and miscegen as unclassifiable as a severe case of Debs aggravated by symptoms of Coxey and Altgeld, he had, nevertheless too much animal self-respect to ever incur censure for getting humanly drunk. While the giddy whirl of current events whirls even more giddily, let us remember that virtue in his favor.

Man's frailty darkens many a sad, sad story--sad as a volume of the Congressional Record; the Army Mule's frailties were few, his conquests many. He was amiable after all; even General Butler, the most illustrious heavenly twin of war times, conceded that much. His temper was by no means of the cactus order, generally speaking. He chooses grudges with rare discrimination; it is always safe to suspect the man that a Mule hates. Patient in toil; silent in suffering; cogent and cautious as the rule in Shelly's case; serene amid direst confusion and alarm; heedless of ancient sarcasms decaying or petrified, he was in no sense a grumbler, and in no unpardonable sense a kicker. His hours of feed were unstable as the advertising rates of a poor but honest journalist, yet he was lighter of heart than a newly married gent rushing the oil can to a corner grocery.

If to his straight enduring back a mountain howitzer was sometimes strapped and fired without unslinging, he accepted the indignity, went to grass with the recoil, and rose for the next inning, unruffled as an expert witness emerging from the labyrinth of a hypothetical question--oh! dimless, unknowable Mule!

A retired tobacconist adopted for the motto of a fresh coat of arms to be emblazoned on his carriage panels: "_Quid Rides?_" Why do you laugh? After a Saint Petersburg assassination episode it is comparatively immaterial whether you call the widow czarina or imperatritza. In these peaceful days, Lincoln's speech at Gettysburg, translated into the jingling speech of Chinamen, and even into the jabbering Japanese, which rivals the contortions of the kinetoscope, opens a new evangel to their narcotic, Oriental souls. Sherman's marvelous retreat from Atlanta to Savannah is studied by the strategists of deepest Afgahnistan; alleged busts of John A. Logan are worshiped as idols in innermost Kamchatka, and spicy narratives we told to credulous marines are the basis of classic fiction on the Congo.

Hence nothing is frivolous that lends an added array to the most luminous chapter of contemporary history--of any history. While in the matter of beer, the foreigner unquestionably pays the tax, or most of it, yet as between natives, white-colored may lose and black may win; 'tis hard to tell. Make no mistake as to the intrinsic, historic importance of the forgotten, unforgetting Mule!

The empty skeptic may come forth with fire in his eye and boiled egg on his whiskers seeking to overwhelm us with the gorgeousness of his gush or the sumptuousness of his gall. To empty skeptics, or shallow scoffers, these simple annals of a lowly career may seem fruitless as that famous sour apple tree that failed to yield its promised harvest; hopeless as the perpetual revolutions of a bob-tailed dog chasing the vacant space where the tail should be; tasteless as fried smelts; thankless as opening a mint sauce to the free coinage of lamb. The chappie fellows who flutter at functions and titter at teas may scoff or scorn. But the eye of calm philosophy ought to beam kindly on a faithful effort to weave unconsidered trifles of truth into a wreath of earned, though meager and belated justice, so that even the wayfaring man, though full, need score no errors.

The speechless, unquenchable Mule was a real factor in those events we love to commemorate. It is asserted that only one man now survives who helped whip Lee at Gettysburg, and then marched triumphantly with Grant into conquered Vicksburg next day. But the Army Mule did both, and more! He went out with the mob of pinfeather volunteers, who spent their first callow days principally in vociferous "swearing in," and their sappy nights at discordant drills in patriotic minstrelsy.

With less recognition than even the barnstormers' encore of addled carrot and frumescent cabbage, he helped wet-nurse our infant regiments when they were just getting able to sit up and gaze vacantly around. With a prodigious faculty in his heels for putting strange faces in heaven, he held himself in commendable subjection while incipient legions evolved themselves out of chaos. He passed on, beaten with many stripes, to that multitudinous aggregation called an army, where human atoms, swarming and wriggling to the music of brass bands, like agile mites in a nugget of archaic cheese, united to give him the frigid shake with a glad hand. The girl, photographed for her lover with her vail down, that his sister might not recognize the likeness, was a miracle of modest artifice; thrice proficient in meritorious cunning, the unassuming, artful Mule.

Unequally yoked in servitude to a cowboy taskmaster, unlovable as the venerable Smallweed's brimstone, blackbeetle helpmeet, also redheaded, hare-lipped and stuffed with nitric nine-cornered blasphemy, he plodded painfully on. Stark and indurate like an Adirondack meadow enameled with trap rock, he plodded rigidly on. Anhungered and athirst, with no credit at the sutler's, on he plodded, through hot, white clouds of drastic turnpike dust, or red and hideous depths of gummy mud, dragging incredible burdens of those indispensable supplies that smooth war's wrinkled front and quell its clamoring emptiness. When he diffidently claimed his share of such supplies, he was given the marble heart or the dry and dreadful laugh--yea, the juiceless, mechanical laugh, with daggers in it.

Oh! liberty, what humbugs are nurtured in thy name! Prodded and flayed until his staggering knees, his welt-fretted haunches and his bloody nostrils placarded his agony, the Army Mule accepted the wideopen policy of his castigator and crunched his barmecide feasts, lacerated and scarified, hoping the brighter day.

Like the intoxicating bewilderment of a reception ball, decorated with roses, lilies, smilax, palms and electric illumination, come back to us those grateful reminiscences, crowded with apparitions of the maligned, mellifluous Mule. Leashed and shackled, foodless in the drizzly, sleety camp, when our quarrel with destiny was an octave higher than usual, his cheerful night cries, welcome as suicides to a coroner, exorcised the blue devils of our dolorous solitude.

While fumes of our priceless coffee floated pleasantly pungent like the cedar aroma of a moth closet, the tuneful echoes of those night cries floated also--Mule answering unto Mule in fond, fraternal recognition. Baptized with fire, adjacent or remote, even if only with its rumors and reflections, the pattering skirmish shots of distant action, he at length became a veritable veteran. Like a thrice-rejected suitor finally made happy, he had been well shaken before taken. And now, a warrior bold, seasoned to war's alarms, he could, upon occasion, thirst or seem to thirst for gore, with all the mad ferocity of a sheep smitten with hydrophobia, or a camel charged with nitroglycerine. Duplicating the awkwardness of man's debut into polite society delayed until past the meridian of life, this ardor of the mettled, military Mule, if late, was touchingly conspicuous.

Marching triumphant home, kneesprung but irrepressible, his large, luxuriant ears were tremulous with the hysterical emotions of the hour, and his double-turreted voice was loudest in the wild acclaim of victory. Long years he lived, it may be, wearing on knightly shoulder a proud insignia of his service, the indellible brand of honor, which no humility of avocation could degrade nor purse-proud aristocracy of money bags, the basest known on earth, contemn with impunity. And when the end comes, as come it must, even to the longevous Mule, then speechless and unspeakable at last and eternally, the flag under which he toiled might be put to worse uses than that of covering his emaciated frame as it is trundled off to the glue-factory.

I mean no disrespect to the flag.

* * * * *

That flag is our flag! Man has always and everywhere sought in bannered blazonries the symbol of a sovereign power. Everywhere and in all times some emblem of a might which confessed no mightier has led embattled hosts to triumph, and taught heroic spirits how sweet it is to die. The banner becomes the crystallization of the nation's life, and the embodiment of her glory, until fighting beneath it is patriotism, dying for it is immortality, and treachery to it is the blackest of crimes. Our flag of beauty and renown, descending to us from stainless sires by a shining pathway, pure as that down which the holy grail slipped from the opening heavens, won a new lustre in the hands of our generation. Overlapping each other in the crowding profusion of their golden legends, every stripe of our banner is weighty with its battle roll, even as each silver star burns the prime jewel in a crown of valorous achievement.

Donelson and Shiloh and Vicksburg; Nashville, and Murfreesboro, and Kenesaw; Winchester and South Mountain and Antietam; Gettysburg and the Wilderness and Appomatox--these and five hundred more. How the deathless names gild the resplendent folds of the proud ensign of liberty! Flag of the continent, rivers and seas; flag of a reunited country; flag of the glorious past and of the dimless future; flag of freedom; flag of the world!

Washed in the blood of the brave and the blooming,
Snatched from the altars of insolent foes;
Burning with star-fires, but never consuming,
Flash its broad ribbons of lily and rose.

Let us never cease to cherish the remembrance of the days when we followed it and fought for it. Among the soft, delicious echoes of those days which float booming across the ocean of memory will sometimes come, whether we greet it kindly or coldly, a sunny recollection of the seductive wink, the tuneful bray and the electric kick of the Army Mule.

THE SUTLER

II

Now the time has arrived when this matter of the Sutler should be brought into its true alignment. His status should be differentiated and embalmed in due longitudinal sections of small pica. It should be finally settled whether he was the reincarnation of a seventeen-year locust, or only a pansy blossom, with lips all mute like a thinking star in the back row of a ballet. An excess of incertitude also prevails as to his rank and historic area. This latter at least should be staked out and cross-sectioned for the annals that portray scenes when heroes' heels were on the shore of Maryland, my Maryland; which annals are expected to go shimmering down festive centuries clothed in the perennial freshness of St. Shamrock's day in the morning.

The Sutler was born, not made. That is to say, his tendencies were ingrained, perhaps hereditary, even in cases where his selection was nepotic or accidental. Once he was purer than beautiful snow, it may be, but even then he was a Sutler in embryo. And when the beautiful snow was gone; when gentle spring had sprung and the croak of the crocus was heard in the land; when the premature robin, wearing a sore throat and lung-pads, came with hoarse notes whistling of peace when there was no peace, because Sumter had surrendered--then Sutlers blossomed out with the peach trees, to bear miscellaneous fruitage later on.

Army service gave technical nomenclature to many familiar avocations and characteristics. Smoked halibut by any other designation would be a thirst-provoker just the same. But some of these military titles were very effective disguises. The ecclesiastical monitor, from spur to plume a star of sanctimony, was called the chaplain. The pharmaceutical tenderloin, with a razor edge to his voice at sick-call ceremonies, was called a surgeon. The district messenger boy was called an adjutant, and could upon occasion play a notable poker game with the able assistance of his sleeve. The hearse thronged with blood-curdling Lady Macbeth suggestions was called an ambulance, and its driver, sure of dry lodgings, ranged high up in the Four Hundred. The speechless indispensable instrument of transportation, which performed most of the work and received none of the pay or glory, was called a mule, with various picturesque prefixes. The sergeant-major, noted for vast acrobatic ability and imposing length of leg, was called--everywhere. The colonel was often called a ---- fool; the quartermaster was usually called a ---- rascal; and the real rascal was sometimes known as the Sutler. The blanks represent profanity, which I abhor.

Before those subsequent halcyon days when it had been demonstrated by experience that the beneficent and plenteous sweet potato supplied the precise nutritive elements best calculated to evolve serene contentment and epicurean bliss; while yet each soldier was a voluble and self-satisfied critic of tactics, strategy, logistics, finance and diplomacy--then a Sutler's supplies were deemed absolutely essential to the successful prosecution of war. But even then a measurable discernment prevailed. Positive subtle, comparative and superlative Sutler, was an acceptable etymologic formula in many varieties of North American broken English. That was a period famous for the wild coinage of phraseological vacuums into available linguistic currency, and for the mad massacre of innocent idioms. If this formula is incorrect it should be promptly amended by some of the back-easty opinion architects who now lead public sentiment with a stub-pointed pen, in long-distance controversies with hired prevaricators of a capitalistic press out in Idaho, such as write their articles on birch bark and wear a coat only on legal holidays. We can not always trust the future, especially at our age. Corrections should be made now--the able editors need not all speak simultaneously.

The Sutler kept, or at least tried to keep, alleged articles of virtu for sale to the "boys," so-called, meaning the soldiers. With warm hearts, cold feet, flexible stomachs, bashful consciences, and a perpetual feeling of weariness in the mouth, these "boys" constantly environed him from zenith to nadir and return. Selling was hard as teaching silver-tongued statesmen that cleanliness and godliness are contiguous. Keeping was harder than selling, and getting pay was hardest of all. Thus beset with hardships his lot rivaled in cheerlessness that of the scratcher in politics, with a wasp-waisted brain, a protuberant rectitude, a self-lubricating egotism, and exactly the minimum of soul that serves in lieu of salt to save his carcass from decay. What with shortage and leakage and stealage by pretended friends, often self-convicted like a young man with an indentation of corset steel in his cuffs, on the one hand, and imminent risk of capture by an alert enemy on the other hand, the Sutler's stock in trade was rather more uncertain than the salivary aim of a sociable Virginian.

The causes, incidents and results of the war in which he was a stockholder with personal liability, though not a managing director, were momentous to him as to all mankind, including such as still gnash their teeth over him and revile his memory. It was a turning point in the progress of a race; the culmination of a long series of political events; the breaking down of an extended line of political compromises futile as an attempt to combine finance with faro; the upheaval of a mountainous aggregation of suppressed political forces; the explosion of a mighty reservoir of hidden political combustibles; and in its attendant events, as well as its remote consequences, it was as tremendous a revolution as any which freights the records of human destiny. This must be remembered to the Sutler's credit as he drifts off into the subsequently.

It was a vast army. Why, its brass buttons alone weighed over a thousand tons! No Sutler was ever drafted into that army. Hence no Sutler ever hired a substitute and afterward suffered reproach for failure to weave immortelles around his sarcophagus. He could not wait for the draft; the last thing he desired was a substitute. He wanted to go himself. He volunteered early and often, with visible alacrity and enthusiasm. He frequently tumbled over himself in his eagerness to move the previous question, and blasphemed his own folly with plunging-shot fierceness a little later. As the aborigine exchangeth wampum for small-pox, silk hat and delirium tremens, so the sanguine Sutler often parted with peace of mind for very inadequate consideration. Rosy were his dreams of rolling, gloating wealth; cruel his awakening to the paralyzing verity. Frailty, thy name is fortune! Only an expert can distinguish between an asset and a liability.

Acquit him in advance of hypocrisy and thus clarify the record. Money was his avowed objective, the richly upholstered goal of his solicitude,--money, even if merely accumulated for division among the lawyers retained to break a will, as too frequently eventuates. For him one crowded shower of glorious gold was worth a whole aurora borealis of golden glory, earned at thirteen dollars a month and half rations. Others might fight battles or write ballads for his country; he was content to peddle its "Thomas and Jeremiah" fluid in flat tin cans, surreptitious, villainous, and expensive. Others might stand like Sheridan at Stone's river, holding his division amidst a cyclone of shotted flame; he only asked a front seat at the paytable. Others might manage the finances of a nation and temper wind to shorn shams; he only petitioned that Sutler's checks be made full legal tender in his military division. Others might yearn or pretend to yearn for bleeding wounds and storied busts; sufficient unto him was two hundred per cent. profit on cove oysters of antiquity. Like a fashionable belle, his heart was always in the right place--the market place. Honor and fame from no such conditions rise.

Pardonable then was his wrath when edibles and potables disappeared unpaid for into parts unknown save to the Latin tongue, whence they could be recovered only by the gentle persuasion of a stomach pump. Thus the yellow coinage of his rapt preliminary visions faded incomprehensibly into nothingness. Thus he emulated the survivors of a cholera epidemic who only hear in happy dreams the footsteps of return. Give him air! He had cause for chagrin equal to that of the Senegambian colony with a new coon in town and no heat hot enough to roast a 'possum. He had a right to grow apoplectic with fury and devastate the camp like a commercial maelstrom or a political avalanche. He righteously resented; he piously protested. He were a craven else, and the heir and ancestor of cravens. Do you laugh at him? So did Sarah laugh at the angels, but they laughed last.

That the Sutler's gallantry in action was specially exemplified in a "charge," is a chestnut bald and hoary with unchallenged longevity. It is one of those remarks that vegetate through a sequence of drowsy centuries, to reappear during each spring season of chronology with a masterful reach that brushes cobwebs from the skies and topples chimneys down. Representative war-humorists who ride astride the whistling winds, spurting effluent sluices of word-wash, and typical war orators sorely afflicted with engorgement of vocabulary, combine to exploit this moldy scintillation, joint product of brain sweat and elbow unguent. They talk through their chapeaux. Every man is a quotation from his forefathers. Every pun is a quotation from paleocrystic cerebration. As vinegar to the teeth and smoke to the eyes, so is misprint witticism to the properly instructed intelligence. It is wicked to laugh at a bishop; it is criminal to laugh at jokeless jocularity. He who can separate eloquence from the gastric gases and distinguish between the sharps and flats of _facetiæ_, suppressing his intellectual impatience at the unbridled linguistic solecism, may pertinently ask: Wherefore not? To charge was human, but to collect was sublime; always difficult, often impossible. The credit a Sutler was obliged to give was often as long as a plea in chancery. He was the old man not afraid of eternity; and the prospective extended term of payment, if happily payment should ever come at all, was a prime element in adjusting margins of profit. His sole competitor in this line of making a charge is said to be the modern plumber--he of the slow step and quick respiration redolent of raw onions--he of the small tenderness and large bill. But that is a chestnut musty as the other. Boycott both of them! Only a man of most stomachful and gunpowder instincts, a warrior and a blood-quaffer from aforetime, could long survive the rueful infliction of either.

Although war without a Sutler would have been a barren ideality, worse than politics without the negro, or the free coiner, or the prohibitionist not taxed, yet even with him there was a not infrequent flaw in its felicities. The fact may even at this late day be duly verified by numerous surviving old soldiers, that when he was wanted he was seldom there, and when he was there he seldom had what was wanted. Milk for babes; skim milk for pigs and calves; buttermilk for dyspeptic opulence. Beverages more pungent, searching and responsive were in demand at the Sutler's tent. He trafficked within complex circumscriptions; always threatened with craft and rapacity; always perspiring with fear like the marble statues in Rome at the approach of Hannibal; always liable to be welcomed with bloody hands to an inhospitable calamity. No country cross-roads grocer's assortment was his, reeking with pestiferous perfume of salt fish and sauerkraut; filling the air with a duchess of limburger reminiscence, which was liable to cause the effigy of freedom on her mountain height to experience a very tired feeling. The etiquette of war and the eternal laws of military necessity governed his movements and halts, his stations and stock, his buying and selling. None of the syrupy sweetness and languid trickle of spring poetry voiced his experiences, tempting to practices incompatible with the professions of one who desires to lead an earnest life. The list of his permissibles embraced a varied miscellany of _non-desiderata_, vast as the outfit of the greatest show on this or any other earth. The catalogue of contraband exhibited numberless objects of universal allurement. Peradventure his lockers held six gross of pale pills for pink people (no buyer); meantime his patrons clamored for cheese, cheese, when there was no cheese; not a microbe. Marvel not that wrath accumulated and men bewailed--some men never do get through teething.