The Army Mule and Other War Sketches Part 4

Long clay pipes after the form aesthetically affected by the honest Hollander, bibulous, amphibious and narcotic.

Dry figs and wormy raisins, savory as the juice of hard tack or tent-pin syrup.

Anonymous liquid perdition in sneaking disguises, which, judged by its taste, was a cheap grade of _spiritus strychniti_, but judged by its price was molten pearl diluted with dissolved diamond.

Sundries, etc., etc.

Supposed necessaries of luxurious military existence some of these, more or less urgent even when subsisting on the enemy. In that case the conversion by a.s.similation of Confederate provender into Yankee bone and sinew was a delicious, romantic, patriotic, praiseworthy function. The patriots rather enjoyed this process, but they welcomed a.s.sistance from the foregoing catalogue.

Many articles were purchasable only in those _post_-pay-day periods when the center of financial gravity had been s.h.i.+fted by the exigencies of chuck-a-luck and old sledge from many pockets to one. It is an eminently usable list, resources permitting. Few of the impracticable inutilities of dollar stores or charity bazaars lift here their suspected forms, requiring us to exhaust all statutory and common-law remedies against conspiracy to do great bodily harm. Few of the frabbles are seen which adorn and dignify the dress-suit breakfast given by smirking domestic sn.o.bs to a t.i.tled foreign fraud, unintelligible as a Blavatsky theosophist. Yet even these, to the insatiate askers of the bivouc, would never quite suffice. Do what he could, the Sutler was ever fated to get himself disliked. A boy is a series of accidents at best. Some of the recruits in their haste to enlist forgot to provide themselves with a girl to leave behind. Those persons, unnerved by the bewildering entanglements of Hardee's tactics, and with no restorative compensations, were never satisfied.

They were iron-jawed steam-talkers of calamity, perpetually a.s.sailing the walls of rebellion with huge explosions of wrath, and the flaps of the Sutler's tent with the roar of their grumbling. Deafening was their clamor for some absent staple to which distance lent the deceptive enchantment of a dining-car menu; deep their dismay that it was not held perennially on tap. Providence, a.s.sisted by timely hints from the wagon master, sometimes brought the supply trains within speaking distance by flag signal. But no discoverable influence ever succeeded in keeping a Sutler's stock up to high-water mark of gustatory demand. And all was in the ultimate cooked down to dire alternative of buy (or steal) and have, or do without and gnaw a file and swear.

As a rule the radiant and responsive Sutler embarked on his voyage militant with more or less capital and credit to back up the spirit of acquisitiveness which possessed him with all its quenchless inflammation. They were either his own, or that of the silent partner who procured his appointment, mayhap a modest and mouse-colored statesman from the remote suburbs, but whose ident.i.ty was a secret between himself and high heaven. Both capital and credit were p.r.o.ne to evanescence equal to that of the pungent delicacy called quinine, sole sworn antidote to innumerable gastric plagues. They oozed as oozed insurgent hopes when Vicksburg fell, and the Confederacy, like the vail of Solomon's temple, was rent in twain. A balance sheet after one year's multiplication of tribulation, if the victim managed to survive that long, would usually disclose, on the one side, liabilities to the full extent of capital plus credit as aforesaid, the latter perhaps pitted with very large small-pox scars. On the other side was an array of dubious a.s.sets, embracing chiefly a tattered tent, a shattered wagon and a battered team, five hundred pounds of scorned sundries, sour and fusty, together with a fat ledger-full of "charges" against the killed, wounded and missing, who by a mysterious fatality had been his largest if not his only patrons. Hence this vexation that made him say things innocent youth should not be permitted to hear. Hence those tears, scalding even the nickel-steel armor of his cheeks. Therefore those sobs, soulful as if wrung from the viscera of a sixteen-dollar melodeon. Who hath hoa.r.s.eness of voice? The tearful penitent afflicted with mouth-gout and knee-failure on the morning after a debauch; he speaks in m.u.f.fled tones suggestive of a chastening headache. Who hath redness of eyes? Surely he that tarryeth long over a Sutler's trial balance, consecrated to the apotheosis of infinitesimals.

The Sutler was subject to a military discipline varying from the fierce precision of a Springfield rifle to the grotesque, picturesque and variegated eccentricities of an Austrian musket. He ranked a trifle lower than a mule, but a fraction higher than a corporal. In that princ.i.p.ally, if mislaid or lost in action, he did not need to be officially accounted for in the returns like a mule, and would have slightly better prospects than a corporal of posthumous mutilation as to cognomen in the telegrams. The law recognized him and orders s.h.i.+elded him. That was theory. The veterans jeered at him as at the inexpressibly uncouth antics of the drafted raw disciple; everybody kicked and cursed and plundered him. That was practice. The difference was palpable as a headlight scarfpin; startling as the butcher's bill after a charge on repeating rifle pits; significant as the evolution of a human female form divine from cowskin frock and burlap leggins of semi-savagery to high-shouldered polka-dot robings of advanced civilization--further exalted with a laudable ambition to improve the breed of pug puppies.

The Sutler had no status on parade, review or inspection. In the small tinkle and smear of preparatory smatter which preluded these symbolic mummeries, grewsome as tableaux of Chicago option matrimony (three years with the privilege of five), he was totally ignored. He was out of date like the hot biscuit of our ancestors with its yellow saleratus pungency--an auriferous b.i.+.c.hloride of alkali. He was forgotten; full satisfaction guaranteed. When the long wavy or waveless tangent of bayonets, rustless or rusty as the case might be, stood forth aligned by a tempestuous adjutant with gestures mysterious and masonic, the un.o.btrusive Sutler, clothed in clouds of invisibility, affronted no tenderness of occult proprieties by any tangible revelation. He was out of sight, like the costumes of Tyrolean peasantry, variegated with macaroni braidings. He was absent, conferring perhaps with some ragged Haggard from c.o.xeyville; terms private and no questions asked. When ambidextrous battalions broke by right of companies to the rear into column, and, emulating the conscious mastery of a Sampson hiving his mellifluous swarm in the lion's lordly breast, swept past the statuesque chief of review with resistless swing and strides invincible, he marched not! He sat in seclusion like the stage manager of a bicycle tournament; he rested in abeyance, scorched with scorn and broiling on hot epithets, in the stratified att.i.tude of a listener trying to hear himself cogitate; he waited patiently, vibrating from gay to grave, from saucy to sincere; he lingered; no presents, no flowers. When the reckless inspector snapped hammers and jingled rammers and squinted inquisitively into muskets' murderous mouths, our friend the Sutler, profoundly versed in the preciousness of cautiousness, was nowhere seen. There was no hayseed in his brain; there were no flies on his intellect. With just enough body, perhaps, to serve as pretext for a soul to stay on earth, his great head was crowded from pit to dome with prudence. He had read of premature explosions and was satisfied; he had no wish to be wounded by an accidental discharge of his duty; to him eyesight was a poem and each finger a benediction; he was brave to recklessness, but even his minor members were precious; he blew into no muzzles, for safety is sweeter than fame; children half price.

The most startling of all war reminiscences perhaps was that revealed in far northern Michigan more than twenty years after Lee's surrender.

A party of skaters built huge bonfires on thick ice and finally thawed out an imprisoned echo of bellum days, which cried impressively with the broad, plaintive, querulous, rebel accent of long ago: "All we want is to be let alone!" This current Confederate s.h.i.+bboleth expressed the luminous Sutler's abiding desire. Even when bra.s.s music stormed the camp as with whiffs of canister and grape, deluging all ears in torrents of harmonious discord, he failed to materialize.

Suspicious of invidious comparison with the bluff drum major's majestic gorgeousness, he relieved the strain by withdrawing the infectious pestilence of his overshadowing personality. He vanished like a beautiful dream; relatives might call and learn something to their advantage. There were different opinions as to his whereabouts--but then it is difference of opinion that supports pool rooms as well as church choirs. Concord and discord were alike unheeded. The drum's glum rumble; the mighty trombone's round, reechoed roar; the feeble fierceness of cracked clarionet; the hissing tortures of the tormented horn tuned to the shrieks of lacerated souls; the witchbroth symphony from eye of newt and nose of frog and bar of gospel hymn that drips in blistering spirals out of tone-shattering fifes; the ghastly ground-swell's undertone that floats this fumid wreckage of a.s.sa.s.sinated sound upon its bleeding bosom--all these and other aggravated vibratory horrors searched for him vainly in the nooks and corners of a disgusted atmosphere. He was gone; front seats reserved for friends of the family.

Hence when, if ever, the Sutler shall be monumentalized in imperishable staff, it will be in none of those att.i.tudes spectacular.

An att.i.tude of watchfulness, of expectancy, of expostulation, or of despair like one in last stages of the Baconian theory, were nearest truth to nature. The flas.h.i.+ng outbreaks of his fiery mind, the sorrows of his overloaded heart, no carven stone or molded bronze can portray to skeptical contemporaries, or transmit to an undeserving, unbelieving posterity.

If the post of danger is the post of real honor, the Sutler has been scandalously overlooked in all awards. His a.s.signed position at the rear during an advance, and in front during a retreat, fatally exposed him to depredations of the mixed society indigenous thereto.

Encompa.s.sed with perils, a floating Atlantis mislaid in a cannibal archipelago, his only resource was rat-eyed vigilance and bra.s.s-breasted audacity. A recital of his exploits in defending the citadel wherein his precious perishables lay would s.h.i.+ne with the story of Farragut lashed to a mast, or Hooker bombarding rainbows, a veritable torch-light procession down the dark avenues of history.

Painting him in gaudy hues would be as unaesthetic as offering green goggles to a Delsarte club. But a mild touch of eulogy, a harmless ginger-pop effervescence of panegyric, may supposedly be ventured before we throw him on the tender mercies of posterity. Would Sir Patrick's famed toast to the "b.l.o.o.d.y 69th"--"The last in the field and the first to leave it; equal to none!" pa.s.s muster? If so, who will begrudge? None, we defiantly aver, unless it be some surviving marauder, overloaded with bias and twisted with prejudice until his withers are wrung, who once wore a half-shaved head for Sutler-burglary, then trod the brambly path of humiliation out of camp to the tune of "Rogue's March," while sad breezes sighed through rents in his respectability.

What a magnificent army that was, in which we served--one of the grandest in numerical strength, by far the grandest in its intelligence, its achievements and its inspiration, whereof the world holds record.

Ninus of a.s.syria, 2200 B. C., led against the Bactrians a force of 1,700,000 foot, 200,000 horse, and 16,000 chariots armed with scythes.

Cyrus besieged Babylon with 600,000 foot and 120,000 horse.

Italy, a little before Hannibal's time, was able to send into the field nearly 1,000,000 men. Yet Hannibal, during his campaign in Italy and Spain, plundered 400 towns and destroyed 300,000 people.

When Xerxes arrived at Thermopylae his force by land and sea aggregated 2,641,610, according to Herodotus, a weighty worthy man, and worth his weight in sesterces.

January 1, 1861, the army of the United States consisted of nineteen regiments of all arms, numbering, present and absent, 16,402 officers and men. From April 1, 1861, to April 28, 1865, a monthly average of 56,000 men, a large army in itself, was recruited, equipped and supplied for the volunteer forces. At the last-named date 1,034,064 volunteers, after four years' casualties of war, were actually in the service. From first to last 2,678,967 men were mustered in, const.i.tuting 1,668 regiments of infantry, 232 of cavalry and 52 of artillery--total 1,952 regiments. In three months, from May 7th to August 7th, 1865, a total of 640,806 troops were mustered out of service and restored to the ranks of productive citizens.h.i.+p. The cost of the war to the United States government has been measured in money at $3,963,159,751.15. The states in rebellion aggregated an area of 733,144 square miles, with 12,572 miles of navigable rivers, 2,523 miles of sea coast and 7,031 miles of inland boundary.

With these facts for a basis we may, if courageous, inst.i.tute comparisons with the great events of history. Courage is essential. A page of fulminating statistics is as dangerous to the unwary as a loaded gun-boat floating with the current, c.o.c.ked, capped and aimed below the water line. In a village ignorant of the science of the division of labor, one may get his child christened by the same artist who repaired his boots. In certain localities one may revel, so to speak, in the enjoyments of a broad phase of humor, based on fried onions, carbolized tar and commodities of that sort, or of a broad plane of sociability, based on plug tobacco, pint flasks and discussion of dog pedigrees. But in the higher realms of statistics, and other like researches, success depends upon the cultivation of devoted courage, courageous fort.i.tude, and a subtle intellectuality intricate as the distorted diagram on the face of a moss agate.

Fenimore Cooper depicts the army Sutler of the Revolutionary contest as a woman; habitually Irish; rubicund, snuffy, blasphemous and addicted to gin--in brief an object of charity, socially and pecuniarily. She can be fitted out, without violence to probability, with an eye like a cross-section of hard boiled egg, and the shallow retreating brow of an ibex; also with cotton in her ears. Her clothing might easily have been fished out at random from a box of contributions to hailstorm sufferers. Her coquettish, curly locks were doubtless of oak.u.m texture and solferino tinge. This much is conjectural, for when we read on and learn that she was the camp washerwoman we abandon the pursuit forthwith. Like flowers that bloom in the j.a.panese spring, she has nothing to do with the case. She vanishes like a congressman (before the czar era) constructively absent when a quorum is to be burst. The Sutler of our more refined war period was of the man masculine. No woman could have filled this requisition, even in those days of Brigham Young's multi-wife propaganda. No woman could have fought the good fight and kept the stock in such a crisis, even with her trousseau reduced to a calico basis. Where languorous lilies fill the eye with beauty, let the gentler s.e.x abide. A woman in our Sutler's sphere would have been more useless than the horse that sustains superannuated relations to a fire department. She would have been more expensive than the funeral of a deceased statesman charged to the contingent fund; more dangerous than a damp bas.e.m.e.nt. During twenty centuries, while among men the glorious Roman has degenerated into the monkey-tamer, woman, on the contrary, has greatly advanced. And the advanced woman has apparently come to stay. The ethereal creature who succ.u.mbed to tight lacing has vanished. A stronger, sterner cla.s.s succeed. The manly miss comes forward, and her demands are something sumptuous. Nothing less than the mandarin's full yellow jacket and peac.o.c.k feather will suffice.

But the most fluent champion of uplifted femininity never dared to rise with a whir to claim this dizzy pre-eminence of a Sutlers.h.i.+p. The cut of her garments may be virile and chic, still she aspired not so high. The bravest of meat-stall heroines, with slaughter-house eyes and leaf-lard complexion, may declaim suffrage syllogisms with the witchery of a South Missouri angel, and her young man may tear his hair in angry anguish at the thought, but Sutlers.h.i.+ps transcend the ambition of both.

Of the man masculine was our Sutler. Not a woman. Neither a dude. No gallon of gall in a plaid suit, owed for, could have endured, for one short seething, scorching month, these multiplex ordeals of catastrophe. At the current quadrennial round-up of aspirants, when the internal revenue bung-smeller parades his political scars, the dude is sometimes seen--in the Sutler's tent never. He would have suffered all the agonies of a bullock threatened with corn-cob strangulation, and no compensatory convictions. It were better to be staked out in the legislative vestibule as custodian of cuspidors. We have been generous in extending the elective franchise to naturalized citizens and all who declare their intention to become such--probably too generous. We have encouraged foreign nations to work off their damaged and unsalable goods on us, in the immigrant line, as in other lines. But we have never been cruel. We have pitied the sorrows of our rich young man. We have certainly never been cruel enough to expose our helpless, inferior fellow-creatures, those curled darlings of dandydom, to vicissitudes like that of the Sutlers.h.i.+p. That were an infamy fit to make the green goods gouge and the gold brick trick eminently respectable by comparison. Dudes have their function. So have train-boys and other calamities. So have rose sherbet and chewing gum; so have lambrequins and doilies. But not in war time. Neither they nor any other gin-fizz effervescence of intangible ephemera.

Their fate in such surroundings would be sad as that of the tough but meritorious army mule, who survived all war's perils, and thirty years later shattered his hind leg, from hoof to hip, on the chin of a traveling highwines apostle from Louisville. There was absolutely no place for the dude in our army life. The velvet of his voice would speedily roughen. One week of hard bread would ruin his teeth; one day's rasp of the wind would utterly devastate his complexion. The rural visitor who begins his city experiences by being piloted to a bunco bank, and ends them by being piloted to a p.a.w.n-shop, would encounter no more swift, inglorious career. The horrors of the zero season are intensified when the man with a cold in his head insists on discussing financial issues with us at every turn. The inconveniences of army life were p.r.o.nounced enough, as it was, without the further infliction of the dreadful dude, in Sutler's trains or elsewhere. Nay, verily! This small erratum of nature, this insectiverous insignificance, had no place or function there. Heredity endowed him with an intellect requiring a three months' vacation four times a year, and fate left him to the full enjoyment thereof. Fortunately for the credit of this nation the rebellion was efficiently and sufficiently suppressed without his infinitesimal a.s.sistance.

It is a sad and significant fact that the navy had no Sutlers. The sailors and marines missed the picturesque inspiration of his ministering service; the exuberant and perennial freshness of his presence; the sounding bra.s.s of his tickling symbols. Our surviving web-footed compatriots modestly demand that due recognition be accorded their important branch of the belligerent forces. In making and enforcing claims to our attention, their honest clamor fills the sea-coast air, from Greenland's icy icebergs to Charleston's s.h.i.+fting sands. And they have right. Did not each base of our supplies rest on a waterway patrolled by gunboats? Were not all our armies named from streams along which their fraternal tin-clads trolleyed and thundered?

Was not brave Jack always ready, manning the yards, when we fell back for reinforcements, and the like, to receive us with three cheers and a Dartmouth yell? Did not the Monitor, that grand old frigate, without a sail, a mast, a rope, a stem, a stern, a yardarm or a bowsprit, steam straight into the core of our hearts, and ram her chilled steel nostrils far and away into the realms of historic muse?

The naval veteran of to-day, working his chin industriously to keep his teeth tight and vigorously dodging as best he may the wiles of the world, the flesh and the politicians, complains at times that scant allusion crops out in war reunions to episodes wherein he figures l.u.s.trously. Here let full justice be freely done. For Farragut and Foote and Porter, for Dupont, Dahlgren, and a hundred more, and all their thousands of devoted, daring s.h.i.+pmates, let honors thicken with the pa.s.sing years, and glories brighten as the centuries roll on! The same glad impulse burned within their b.r.e.a.s.t.s; the same great triumphs gilded their endeavor. Their manners and methods differed widely from ours, but in aim and motive we are one. It is their good fortune never to have known how much they lost in having not the solace of the Sutler. It was not their fault.

The young recruit, christened Zephaniah, was not responsible therefor, because he experienced his origin at a period when he was powerless to direct results. If good people would only learn to vote as they pray, it might possibly be different. But let even a marine run up against a brace game in Dead Man's Gulch, and permanent enlightenment is liable to eventuate. And when the atmosphere of our homes grows mephitic with the odor of satanic journalism, we may perhaps awaken to the danger of cultivating depravities that are calculated to stimulate a boom in the brimstone market.

Connecticut produced a learned pig which could read; New York, not to be outdone, exhibits some educated donkeys that can write, that can even edit newspapers, have done it, have been caught in the very act, and, alas, seem inclined to boast of it. When such things can be, and overcome us like a summer sunshade, why marvel that the navy had no Sutler? If a shattered and battered son of the sea comes forward now and then to bask in the glow of that comrades.h.i.+p we so fondly cherish, let us bid him jolly welcome. In that long period which elapsed between the dates when President Jefferson Davis was captured in confidential costume and President Grover Cleveland escaped from the congressional trocha, our people were steadily but very slowly growing to an appreciation of their numerous blessings. During this period many a stranded ex-sailor found himself filled with the vague unrest of a rural legislator who for the first time carries a railroad pa.s.s in his pocket. The yearning for travel was irresistable. He has thus projected himself into the sphere of our observation as far inland as Indianapolis or Omaha. If we have not seized the opportunity to thank him for Hampton Roads, and Mobile Bay, and Fort Saint Phillip and Pittsburg Landing and Fort Fisher, for New Orleans and Pensacola and Galveston, we have ignored a binding obligation and neglected a golden opportunity. Let us ignore, neglect no longer.

We yield him full measure of credit. We regret more than words can express that he never enjoyed the felicity of having a Sutler. If one were accessible he should be introduced to him, even now!

The impression which seems to be somewhat currently prevalent, in circles usually well informed on financial topics, that many of the largest fortunes of our present era were founded on the war-profits of army Sutlers, is manifestly erroneous. It is at all times easier to get poor in a minute than rich in a month, according to one of the wise saws of the transcendental orientals. The wealthy widow who has wasted her substance in riotous trolley parties can verify it.

Fortunes have originated in the profits of army contracts, judiciously invested in well-slanted real estate at Pittsburg or Cincinnati. Their inheritors have perhaps reached congress where they speak speeches prescribed for them by a scrivener. Upon the condemned horses of the thrifty quartermaster, or sunken cargoes of costly oats duly accounted for by economical commissaries, mysteriously materializing later in tangible cash, large estates have been based. They were mostly dissipated thereafter by extensive land-purchases in remote regions notable chiefly for a particularly brazen sky and a specially mean annual temperature, where the prairie dog yelps to his or her mate as the case may be, sole disturbers of all the dismal silence in nature's vast immensity.

Even the sumptuous pay of the pampered and envied private soldiers, the magnificent stipend of thirteen dollars a month equal to an average of at least six dollars in the precious gold of that period, was sometimes duly h.o.a.rded at compound interest. This, with occasional mining stock speculations on the side, may have rolled up in the course of a generation to that standard of affluence which glitters with hope of dowry to dudes or alimony to divorce lawyers. Believe it ye who can; a.s.sert it ye who dare. It would not be incredible. The first kiss, alas! often leads to more.

Balder fictions have found credence at the chrysanthemum club, where the lack l.u.s.ter eye of the effete plunger gazes into the gurgling optic of the breadstuff debauchee, and where harvesting a royal flush is the leading industry. Wilder improbabilities were widely swallowed before the Russian Israelites landed on our coast and introduced their rich nut-brown flavor to the ward caucus, together with the corrugated spirituality of a bethel-vocalist and the vulcanized nerve of a Tammany leader. Statements like those might pa.s.s current in village drug stores, where streams of limpid, scented crystal burst forth from marbleized iron fountains at five cents per burst. Rumors equally incredible have floated around unchallenged at _recherche_ receptions given by Mrs. Olof Swenson, of the James River Valley, S. D., to the local colonial dames. Notwithstanding all this, such allegations as these, with due, determined effort, might be made to harmonize with possibility like a red cart with a sorrel mule.

But no properly fertilized intellect can ever germinate a supposition that the rudiments of even one contemporaneous million were laid in the career of a Sutler. A hundred s.h.i.+llings invested in trade will give a man meat and wine; in acres it will give him cabbage and salt, wrote another astute Arabian--or mayhap the same. But the Sutler trade is a valid and visible exception, verified by experience, costly as an Indian outbreak and conclusive as the rebound of a London free-trade banquet in the wilds of West Virginia.

Poets of every cla.s.s have license to festoon life's oasis, _et cetera_, with plat.i.tudes and illogical a.s.sertions. But historians, like the undersigned, must deal in fragments of the eternal verity.

Even the strawberry roan versifier of Zanesville, shouting through a hole in his headgear, would burst his organ of ideality in the effort to imagine heirs for the Sutler. He never gave them kingdoms or dollars. They can not shake their crimped bangs at him and say he eats pie with a knife, and absorbs soup with emphasis from the end of a spoon. They can not give him the cold and gurgling laugh--he never cultivated them beyond the radius of their capacity, and endowed them with wealth beyond their powers of a.s.similation. In all the wide, wild stretch of liars from Ananias to Zola, none will be found bold enough to a.s.sert it.

If the descendants of the Sutler are sn.o.bs and sneaks and shams, social swells and moral lepers, with breath sweetly perfumed and hearts bitter as Peruvian bark tempered with aloes, they owe no part of their equivocal character or position to the influence of wealth derived from him, for he had none. Thus by his lack of lucre to bequeath, he has avoided many horrible and torturing responsibilities.

For a man who has been ruined by a woman there is no law and no judge.

The inheritor of lightly won riches enters the race for success in life with a handicap weighty as the breech of a disabled columbiad.

Gaze not upon the red rectification of the illicit still; quaff sparingly the purple vintage of the Iowa drug store; yield not to temptation at the stage of a game where the jack-pot boils over; drop not your precious cash into the open palm of financial enthusiasts whose soaring souls see cloudbursts of wealth in every fleece of floating vapor; yield no credence to the millionaire who boasts of his large inheritance from a Sutler's profits.

As a rallying point in battle, rivaling redans, redoubts and parapets, rifle-pits, abattis and _chevaux-de-frise_, the Sutler's wagon has been apostrophized in many bursts of eloquence at reunion banquets where wit and wine flow sparkling like the dew. When thrust out between contending armies by design or accident, that modest vehicle became a glittering prize worth fighting for and risking amputations for, beside which even the old flag paled for a s.p.a.ce its ineffectual splurge.

Friends, comrades who had lived together in the little shelter tent, slept under the same blanket, divided the scanty ration and drank from the same canteen, rallied around its doubtful treasures with all the swift energy of a benzine explosion. Foes, hungry as sawtooth sharks, a.s.sailed and rea.s.sailed it, the rich fruition of their whetted desires. Where was the hilarious Sutler then with his bluegra.s.s fertility of resource? Neither in that beleaguered thesaurus nor even entrenched beneath it, you may confidingly affirm, but likeliest from safe shelter of some commodious, commanding stump, observing the struggle with a rural Sunday morning cheerfulness. Like George Eliot's hero, he is lord of the moment's change and can charge it with his soul.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ... _But likeliest from safe shelter of some commodious, commanding stump, observing the struggle with a rural Sunday morning cheerfulness_]

The rich man unlearned in logic hires logic in form of a lawyer to prove anything it is profitable to have proven. So a Sutler, dest.i.tute of arms, knows that his armed compatriots will rescue his appetizing goods from the enemy's most ferocious onslaughts, howbeit but to be skinned and skimmed by themselves next moment before his horror-smitten face, with comments recordable only in violation of several salubrious enactments for the suppression of blasphemy.

Perhaps tradition has been too caustic or too facetious in its treatment of the unarmed soldiers who honored us with their comrades.h.i.+p--the chaplain, the surgeon and the Sutler. Of the army preacher, who filled his sacred office worthily as many did, let due and reverent acknowledgment be made, in grateful memory of benignant functions purely administered; "the gowned goslings, who were goslings before they were gowned," let us in mercy and in pity commit to the tenderness of eternal silence. The typical army doctor was skillful, devoted, brave and self-sacrificing; at the front amid the blaze and storm of battle; in the rear wrestling with festering wounds or wasting fevers and contagions; everywhere his welcome, hopeful features beamed in gracious blessing on us at our sorest need, and each of us who lives to-day can name the surgeon to whom that life is due. Even the Sutler, of whom we have been treating subjectively and perhaps too unceremoniously herein, when reduced to his objective individual status, has often supplied material for ill.u.s.trating the highest grade of patriotic heroism. The Sutlers.h.i.+p was an agency not devoid of utility, not without the n.o.blest possibilities, by no means unworthy of honor. Let no poet of the war, sitting in the refreshment of the foliage of his phrases and sipping the coolness of the gases of his gall, dare ignore these patent, blatant truths of history. Or if he do, let him be doubly and trebly ware! It is certain that enough scattered, incontrovertible, granite bowlders of fact lie snugly imbedded in the conglomerate of fancy, to roll forward at the final round-up and everlastingly necropolize him.

Where is the Sutler now? Vanished from our ken and beyond all cavil non-existent.

History has few parallels to this absolute obliteration of a species.

The bronzed old admiral emeritus is still extant, with tar on his heel and salt in his eyebrows. Generals in active service thread the German's mazes, agile as when in slim-waisted cadet days they paced flirtation walk, in all the pomp and circ.u.mstance of glorious gray.

The retired list, infallible patent of longevity, lifts high its proud engrossment of venerable colonels and brigadiers, spattered at times with ill-flavored congressional epithets and blown about by every breeze of statesmans.h.i.+p, but yielding still its liberal monthly stipend; there too the Sutler's brief, broad, brambly service is unrecognized. The village boaster boasteth still his grand exploits as the sunset of life crowns a mystical bore. But no Sutler is here or there discerned.

Our pension rolls bear names scarce short a million, but his holds there no objurated blazonry. Myriads of veterans luxuriate in soldiers' homes, but in none of them does he, lingering and voluble, saturated with _vis inertia_, shoulder a crutch and tell how money never is but always to be won. When hale campaigners meet at non-intoxicating suppers where the cheers are not inebriated, and point to themselves with pride (who dare gainsay their right?), his place is but a yawning vacancy. River pilots of the war era, St. Vitus stricken from dodging guerrilla buckshot, have coveted the Grand Army badge; sons of sanitary heroes and of honorable women not a few have pleaded for the Loyal Legion's perquisites vicarious; but no residual Sutler, nor the lineal progeny thereof, draws drafts like these on honor's ample funds. Hence there is no Sutler left, q. e. d. He never got left--the good die young.

Seek ye his obituary in the thin cold records of the alms-house. Find his flat or sunken resting place in crowded silences of Potter's fields and be therewith content. He has pa.s.sed in his "checks." He lives now only as a fond and fragrant memory.