Read Ebook: The Army Mule and Other War Sketches by Castle Henry A Henry Anson Vawter Will Illustrator

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 381 lines and 67715 words, and 8 pages

When his slim sweetheart, the dove-eyed, flat-chested maiden at Onion creek, a stuttering siren to be courted only on the installment plan, sent him to the field, it was with full assurance that he was not lost to her forever--not he! The corn-fed, lank Delilah shrewdly guessed that her prudent wooer would listen to battle's dissonant thunders from posts of distant security, and come back unshot, unsabred, but covered with vicarious glory, which he did. Heaven is merciful to the idiotic and kind to the cautious. His previous occupations had varied from cord-wood carpentry to slaughter-house surgery, and he had always been disposed to shed perspiration with extreme diffidence. He was mostly red-headed. He had been addicted to excess of raw spirits, tobacco and other abominations--loving these, his enemies, with a fine, magnanimous, scriptural, discrimination. He may be relied on to fill a drunkard's grave some day, probably without even asking the drunkard's permission; such are his knavish proclivities. His eye was aglare with hate, every glance a stab. His occasional smile ran through all the gamut of grins, from the smirk of conceit to the simper of toadyism. He had a torpid liver and was no trustee of beauty. His physical development was surprising; even an Englishman never saw anything equal to it--outside of England. He was strong as the Kansas zephyr that carried an anvil ten miles and came back next morning after the hammer. Freckles were his trade-mark and profanity was the staunch, infallible test of his identity. Huge quadrilateral oaths, shingled with brimstone and fringed with fire, were the soft relaxations of his happier hours. Blue, blistering maledictions, flecked with white foam, marked the approach of his paroxysmal frenzies, and no postponement on account of the weather.

Cruelty uncloaked and unleavened, lumpy and rocky, was the energizing motor of his existence. Before he gets three strides into his gait, his antiphlogistic treatment always insures a dispersion of the Mule's vitality into the extremeties--hence those kicks. His vocabulary was a slimy ooze of the gutter, with its wailing stench. His breath was the whiff of loose-corked, all-night gin shops, stale and stifling. His typical caress to the Mule was a blow on the bone of the nose with a neck yoke that settled the animal on his haunches. With a heart false as a weather bulletin, more selfish than a petroleum trust, and colder than a funeral with plenty of money and no God in it, his advent might readily portend that direful apocalyptic sequence: Death on the pale horse and hell not far behind. He was generally hare-lipped.

To the tender mercies of this losel vile were committed by the decrees of inscrutable fate the career and destiny of the speechless, undecipherable Mule, who was often simultaneously off his feed and on to his driver. He may have been an unattractive, non-magnetic quadruped, a ragged hammerhead, with a wall eye and an amputated ear; with yellow, irregular teeth and a surplus of lip. But his redeeming features were sure to be disclosed in the end. The current acceptation of the normal order of things in civil life was no criterion here; there would be scant toleration for the methodical youth who indorsed his sweetheart's first love-letter "Exhibit A."

Ordinarily, when man, a little lower than the angels, bestrides a Mule unquestionably possessed of the devil, he starts on a basalt road to perdition, safe to arrive. Swift as a commuter's kiss at the ferry gang-plank might be expected the direful finale. But in this zigzag of military contradictions things are reversed. The man and the beast have changed places. The semi-seraph and brevet horse have been subjected to a mysterious transformation of functions, and gravitation working t'other way lifts things skyward, as it were. The man sinks; the animal soars--thrusting his jaw out sidewise in a satisfied yawn, secure in the serenity of his asininity.

Man approximated to the Mule ideal of gentility when he began to suspect that the entire system of army team discipline rested on a false basis. But that suspicion had not dawned at the close of the war for the suppression of the rebellion--if, indeed, it has yet dawned. The platform of the Mule millennial: Six quarts of oats at a feed; a blanket; two curry-combs of assorted fineness; no spurs; no whip; no cursing--this was a dim vision of futurity; alluring but delusive as the seductive rustle of grain in a tin pan, with the ensnaring halter deftly hidden.

Fortunately for the Mule his epidermis was thick and tough, a non-conductor of pain, as it were; fortunately for his flagitious tormentor, likewise for other glowing lights of genus human, he was speechless. If the Mule could talk! What new aspects would be given to war-memoirs; what side-gleams would be thrown on historic events; what showers and floods of reinforcement would be added to the gurgling, vasty streams of patriotic reminiscence. He had his opinions on the conduct of the war, and on the character of the warriors, also the teamsters; but those opinions remain unrecorded and to all intents and purposes unexpressed. He reserved them, which would be deliciously sweet of him, don't you know, if it had not been involuntary and unavoidable.

The capacity of this observant, discriminating animal to sit in judgment on the character of his stridulous driver can scarcely be subject to reasonable question. The judicial cast of intellect is so universally associated with solemnity of visage that the terms become substantially interconvertible, like the principles of a polished politician. When the Army Mule lowers his head and lifts his eyebrows and searches profoundly through his stable litter with his deliberative hoof, the rich trolley-line tenor of his tuneful meditations were worth a royal largess to read, assimilate and store away for reference.

The animated dialogue between a truckman and a cab driver in a New York street blockade is said to embody linguistic traits and miracles of lexicography peculiar to the atmosphere of that latitude. The murmurings of a town that is stricken with paralysis at the first intimations of a whisky famine, are marvelously intense and realistic. But the Army Mule's honest and unbiased opinion as to the true character of the army teamster, translated from his equi-asinine vernacular, and rendered into the anglo-effervescent jargon of the bivouac, would rattle like a regimental long-roll and yield aroma rivaling the effluvium of a lime-kiln. His reprobate tormentor, with no perceptible circulation of blood above the ears, presents multiplied testimonials of having long been habitually fed on aqua-fortis, hell-broth and ratsbane. Yet he reveals a cruel coldness that would freeze the milk in a mother's wasted breast or the marrow in her infant's fleshless bones. Hideous as is his chimpanzee conformation of countenance inherited from root-eating ancestors, it only indexes his whole physical structure--a sour aggregation of compost, vitalized by a fetid protoplasm. Within his Nova Zembla skull the pulpy and mysterious growth called brain lies fusty and fumid, steeped in the vapidity of its own purulence.

Offspring of the exiled offal and offscourings of civilization, he grew up in the back settlements untaught, untrained, unkempt, unchristened--not even vaccinated or manicured; and the unwholesomeness of his exhalations vie with the complexities of his vocabulary. The bath-room knows him never, nor tooth-brush ever. To night-shirt, napkin, finger-bowl and fine stationery he is as utterly alien as the remotest autocrat of Congo's jungles. The Indian has now become about as bad as the white man can make him. But it is the firm opinion of the Army Mule that there are lower depths. Somewhere between the Indian's level and that bottomless perdition, where the arches of Tophet redden in the glow of its quenchless flame, there is a midway plaisance tableland, reserved transcendent in its horrors for the ruminating promenades of the teamster terrific. Somewhat lower than the Indian; a little higher than satan and his imps--not much--there is the plane of character assigned with ghoulish gladness to the hare-lipped caliph of the wagon train, by one best fitted, through intimate, hourly association, to measure his moral girth and estimate his mental altitude. There let him roam and range. In years triumphant of the war era, now fast vanishing into the vague and misty past, he had his jubilant day. This bog-spawn of humanity, with his ashes-of-marigold face and his unthatched upper teeth, with his three-cornered hot temper that scorned life's amenities; this slouchy man with moist nostrils and an affliction in his left hip, who at one time hoped to sometime shine as chambermaid to a livery stable but failed, has run his course.

What a child is taught in the abstract he is liable to practice in the concrete, as his subjectivity develops into objectivity, his sentiment into devilment. The Mule driver's unamiable childhood was punctuated with copious threats that the goblins of desperation would get him if he didn't watch out. The events of his pseudo war experience fully verified this dreadful prophecy's prophetic inspiration. The goblins got him and energized him, until his fury often bade fair to shred the Mule into his by-products of kip-leather, trousers buttons and mucilage.

Under such inauspicious guidance and control, the army Mule, luckily pachydermatous, proceeds to the theater of his sanguinary exploits. The rich girl is often in danger of falsifying her accounts by crediting to her personality the charms of her cash. But the cashless, unsusceptible Mule stands in no peril of such baleful self-deception. Lowest in rank of created beings assigned a part in the drama, fame held to him no prismatic rewards for excess of zeal.

He was not built for a general range of cynosure business; homeliness was his heritage from the day he was foaled. He was unpoetic as a miss receiving her beau in the parlor with her two younger brothers sitting in the seat of the scornful hard by. He was unartistic as a Montana hurricane kite--an iron shutter with a tail made of log-chains. He was unsymmetric as a court dwarf with scythe-snath spine and a dome on his shoulder. Hence for the splendid immortality of sculpture he was ludicrously inapt. And if painting deigned to give him grudged space it was ever in the burlesque of cartoonage or the dim littleness of background.

Even the sutler's horse, intoed, sway-backed and wheezy, who had habitually worn a ragged calfskin over his rump as he stood on frosty nights before the war, tied to a rail fence while his owner talked politics in the village grocery, claimed superiority. The picturesque talisman U. S. upon his shoulder was the only badge of honor permitted to the Army Mule, save when the whip-lash had cut out a slice of his skin as a souvenir. But even this significant lettering was often so inexpertly executed as to serve no decorative purpose whatever. It was infinitely less effective than a bran mash to poultice his internal pains, or a roached mane to command external admiration. With one foot over the trace and both eyes blinking, the last state of that Mule was worse than the first. To him all alleged or attempted adornments were superfluous and unsatisfying.

Here then was the sine of an arc which did not recognize equality in the cosine of its supplement. The sorriest horse, though just released from the duty of transporting miscellaneous triturations of real estate in a dumpcart, with his alimentary system painfully void of toothsome internal decoration, outranked the smoothest, softest Mule, whether young or aged, black or sorrel, dun or gray. Nevertheless the explanation of the fact that a rat-tailed cat-hammed Mule weighing five hundred and thirty pounds, saw-backed, sharktoothed, and knobby with protruding bones from throat-latch to crupper, could draw heavier loads than a round robust Norman-Percheron horse weighing a ton, remains to this day unknown, unguessable. Invidious comparison is gross violation of consanguinity equal to marrying one's widow's sister. The checked, banged and bitted high steppers of Fairmount park, dear to the heart of placid quakers because their nerves can endure the strain of "Curfew Shall Not Toll Tonight," or equivalent atrocities, will not be involved therein; their pinked tennis-tan harness, silver trimmed, with monograms at the joints and red stitches in the tug, constitute a perpetual, effectual bar. There was one glory of horse and another glory of mule, but no mule differed from another mule in glory, by any palpable percentage. They had little regard for the affinity of a somewhat common maternity. But whether rearing, plunging, kicking, rolling in the mire or pawing at the clouds, they were all equal. They met upon the level and parted on the square.

The war-horse of the late unpleasantness has been chiseled and painted in many attitudes--especially that of unsupported suspension in the atmosphere, with extended nose and carefully adjusted legs. Sheridan's horse, propelled down the wild, disheveled turnpike by "a terrible oath" at the rate of five miles per stanza, hangs to the canvas in a posture unnatural as that of some artillery steed swung by the breeching from a tree after a caisson explosion. The war-horse has been sufficiently pictured and carved. But he still lacks his literary limner. Almost the sole description of him now accessible is that left by the versatile Orpheus C. Kerr. There is embodied an analysis of that celebrated Gothic steed presented to this Orpheus by his maiden aunt and endeared to the saline affections of the mackerel brigade by several amiable idiosyncrasies. Of whom it is written:

"The beast is fourteen hands high, fourteen hands long, and his sagacious head is shaped like an old-fashioned pickax. Viewed from the rear his style of architecture is Gothic, and has a gable end to which his tail is attached. His eyes are two pearls set in mahogany, and before he lost his sight were said to be brilliant." And more to the same effect, intimating a diet of shoe pegs for oats and saw-dust for millstuffs, save in the rare occasions when he could set his inflexible teeth into a hay bale with unadulterated joy.

Now, shall such of our children's children as through poverty or other crime may be debarred admission to war cycloramas be condemned to surfeit their hunger for knowledge as to the conflict's equestrian features with job lots of descriptive pinxit like this? Is the war charger to be cut off thus with no extra allowance for training or pedigree? Are nice distinctions of gait, between the singlefoot trot and the rack, which are manifestly matters of original brain power and painful culture, modified of course by heredity, to be studiously ignored? In short, is the horse to be thus dismissed into obliquity, so to speak? If so, what conclusions will posterity deduce as to the anatomical development of the speechless inferior Mule? If an animal of fair social position and tenacious of his rank is to be thus lightly disposed of, what can we claim for one of no rank whatever, with only the snap of his teeth and the whisk of his tail to attract attention? The case is critical.

When the kicker in politics dies he stays dead a long time; when an opportunity passes it may never recur. Opportunities for writing correct history are slipping by month after month, year after year. The aged, surviving Mule gets nervous as in the teething period of his suffering colthood, while our expert historians move off toward the horizon, clothed in linen ulsters and vain regrets. We have essays galore on the immorality of trotting and the iniquity of pools. We have treatises enough on overhead check reins and the cruelty of the cable slot. But this is a condition, not a theory, which now reproaches us. Soon it will be too late. If the agitation started here shall finally result in loosening some corset strings of prejudice and fixing the neglected, necessary Mule in his true orbit, all will be well. The opportunities of a grateful country for upholstering his stomach with the finest and greenest her pastures proffer, will soon be gone forever. If we can now succeed in calculating his right ascension and declination, and stamping him on the chart indelibly, we may pass from recreation to refreshment in full assurance of a duty well performed.

Then let us agitate! The winner of the sinful and expensive Derby must not forever flaunt his exclusive title to consideration. The piebald circus favorite shall no longer monopolize the fondness of our rising youth. The praiseworthy Mule, hot and foamy perhaps, stung with gad-flies, thirsty, dusty and cross, but patriotic and persevering amid all, shall have his long delayed due.

The soldier Mule is in harness, fated to accomplish marvels in the sweet ultimate, if his longevity holds out; his neo-pagan steersman, with hare-lip, a hepatized conscience, a peroxide complexion and a solitaire front tooth cut bias, is in the saddle; all being thus in readiness the war can now begin. If the speechless miserable Mule shall unfortunately escape sorosis of the heart, hermitage of the lungs, and percolation by germicide decoctions, so as to live long enough, he will become a veteran. But that is anticipation. The near, dear day will arrive soon enough--alas!

Harnessed and mounted, cursed, cudgeled and spurred he starts on his weary pilgrimage. His emotions are more complex and profound than those with which a young woman receives her first information that there are spring styles in trousers as well as in gowns. For him no primrose paths of dalliance open beckoning; they fade incoherently into the dim bedraggled, with no stretch of white satin ribbons to restrain feminine curiosity.

He travels from Ohio to the gulf, but not in a palace car nor on a deadhead ticket. Far otherwise. He goes out for an extended starring tour in the provinces and assists in presenting a magnificent drama, but only evokes volleys of powerful and prolonged hisses from the guys of the gallery. He brings up the rear of the most gigantic and jubilant salvation army since salvation was revealed, but he is not conceited. He is full of suppressed merit as an egg is of omelet, yet bashful as the kerchiefless caller who toys with the doily in nervous embarrassment while the seconds swell into centuries. He officiates in the conveyance of breadstuffs, otherwise hard-tack, mouldy and fungous, left over from the Mexican war, and fit only for slumgullion; of meats with the odor of a sewer-gas eruption; of black molasses, a sulphuret of glucose, sour as the tartrate of acrimony.

Also desiccated sundries obsolete as a rutabaga turnip, class of '56, or a weather guess from an anti-bilious almanac for '49, or the lottery wheel of a fair fakir in the early thirties. Likewise commissary whisky, vintage of lye, lime and fusel; decanted of all disgusts; confected for the scum of slums. But none of these have terror or temptation for him; he knoweth his master's feed box. A brave, bright, meritorious Mule is he, with a spring in his heel and healing in his springs.

He blots himself out of the green landscape of his youth, the asphodel meadows of peace that lie athwart the rustic tavern with its soft soap, communistic towel and brown sugar. He marches on, marshaled in double column closed in mass, to slaughters that will all the multitudinous creeks incarnadine, and fears not. He steps forth with countenance severe as that of the sterilized milk speculator whose investment has soured, but heart warm as the modest, efficacious fritter, dear to the breakfast relish of Hoosier schoolboys when the frost is on the melon and the fodder's in the stalk. He starts out in the morning eager as if something of great value were hanging just in front of him, with a town supervisor reaching for it and a creditor's meeting in the annex; he trudges along all day with the testy and sub-acid humor of a Pullman conductor, softened by a thousand patriotic reflections; he comes in at night on right by file into line, crisp and beautiful as a sarsaparilla lithograph.

Toil has no fears; he does not care a cigarette for it. After the long day's exertion, with no nutriment but raw fog for breakfast and roasted south wind for dinner, with no encouragement but polyglot epithets from a hare-lipped miracle of mendacity, and frequent usufruct of hissing whip-lash to his quaking flanks and skinned sides, he does not despair. One is foolish to waste time trying to throw five aces with four dice, and the usual rustic system of studying games of hazard has similar elements of weakness; but there is no weakness about the character of the seasoned, unchangeable Mule. If a glossary of battles could be transcribed from the quartermasters' reports of "actions" where Mules were lost, it would make a fearful and wonderful record. But no premonitions of battle trouble him now. With a good hearty roll in the dust and its diatonic accompaniment of snorts, groans and grunts, he rises refreshed. Then he kicks a few times for practice with the agility of an antiquated drum-stick from the black crook ballet, and lies down to rest, supperless but happy. All the visible universe is action and motion, from the slow dissolving mountain of granite, to the fleeting, flitting cloud of vapor that scuds across the sky.

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. . 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.

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. 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.

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!

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet