Part 7

Balder fictions have found credence at the chrysanthemum club, where the lack luster 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 pass 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 _recherché_ 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 shillings 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 class have license to festoon life's oasis, _et cetera_, with platitudes and illogical assertions. 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 assimilation. In all the wide, wild stretch of liars from Ananias to Zola, none will be found bold enough to assert it.

If the descendants of the Sutler are snobs 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 space 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, assailed and reassailed it, the rich fruition of their whetted desires. Where was the hilarious Sutler then with his bluegrass 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.

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, destitute 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 comradeship--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 illustrating the highest grade of patriotic heroism. The Sutlership was an agency not devoid of utility, not without the noblest 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 circumstance 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 statesmanship, 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 passed in his "checks." He lives now only as a fond and fragrant memory.

THE SHELTER TENT

III

Lustrous among war's unfading reminiscences shines the contour of the Shelter Tent. It lingers in memory, unique and delectable, dissimilar but equivalent to our ideal of those fringed silken pavilions wherein apoplectic despots of the orient air their scandalous magnificence amid the frockless squalor of their cringing hordes.

The Shelter Tent was a supplement to the original scheme for putting down the rebellion--a fact, as it were, _dehors_ the record. Only after Bull Run and Shiloh and Antietam and Iuka was the government nerved to the point of requiring its soldiery to shoulder their houses like mollusks, and thus relieve the tuneful, uncomplaining mule of a sore responsibility.

This was an innovation whose dam was Necessity, and whose sire was held to be some emissary of Satan, with an unearned increment of prestige in the counsels of Halleck, general-in-chief, so-called. It was evolved as the molecule evolves protoplasm and from a plastic cell developeth primordial germs. Versatile scorners, voluble as advocates of artesian irrigation, promptly scheduled its pedigree for generations up and down. Minutest of constructed residences for living humanity, save perhaps the half-credible tub of tough Diogenes, it won a way into our reluctant liking that vindicates its title to consideration among the factors of ultimate victory. You may pay the doctor to diagnose and also to prescribe, but you must subsidize the pharmacist before relief is possible.

Most portable of mundane mansions, its very littleness relieved the situation of numberless infelicities,--specifically, of servitude to servants, whether apple-cheeked daughters of Denmark, or saddle-colored Cantonese with eyes cut bias and a Pacific Mail subsidy lingo not on speaking terms with veracity. Likewise other infelicities which relegate housekeeping to the level of a cantharides blister, and which make court corridors ring with the battle-cry for freedom shouted by luckless suitors who married in haste to repent at Sioux Falls.

The Shelter Tent of the war for the Union, so waged, as aforementioned, is said to have been a French device. We shall introduce no evidence in rebuttal. It was unquestionably steeped to the hem in martial economics. It was calculated to rob a miser of all that life holds dear. The force of dire frugality could no step farther go. In the multitude of counselors there is distraction, for existence, like a court-house, is full of trials. But all agree on this question of economy. We lead the world, but the French lead us in these little every-day parsimonies. It was cheap but grand. Beecher once asserted that flowers are the grandest things God ever made without putting an immortal soul into them. Beecher had evidently at that time never treated his optic nerve to a vision of the useful, unobtrusive Shelter Tent.

Woven of white cotton spun to fascine rigidity, sometimes gutta-perchaed to counterscarp imperviousness, its flat measurement but squared an average soldier's stature. When the whirl of recoil developed into a torrent of flight, it was scarcely classed with _impedimenta_.

A weed is said to be only a plant whose uses have not yet been discerned. This square of cotton was to the unsophisticated military discernment first a weed, then a spear, then a full-grown corn in the ear--yea, verily! shelled and in the sack, distilled and in the cut-glass decanter, with accessories duly accessible.

Styled "tent" in the sardonic nomenclature of our nomadic days, it was in sober verity a wrap, a cape, a kirtle or a poncho, which only by connected duplication and reduplication came within the pale of that sonorous title. Only ten men are permitted to exist on earth at once competent to read and understand Plato. Thus precious is equilibrium in a world where the fragment of a donkey jaw has slain thousands. Fewer doubtless would divine at first blush how a square of cotton fabric, set down one side with buttons and holes to match cut opposite, could suffice for each warrior's allotment of habitation in embryo. Still fewer would devise, until Necessity, doting maternal ancestor of rarest constructive genius, came to compel, the forms and structures of abode that lay susceptible within that so innocent appearing segment of a textile web, white, friendly and tractable. Thus history goes on, dancing through the airy nothingness of experiment, dainty as a harebell, graceful as a fawn.

Of what the Shelter Tent had and had not, commended curiosity makes now minute interrogation. It had neither veranda nor portico; if offenses must come, woe to them whereby. No latticed porchway tempted humming birds to linger in its honeysuckle haunts. The bay-window that biteth like a serpent and stingeth like a cactus when the bill comes in, was conspicuously non-existent. Its architectural flippancies were few indeed. No fluted town hall pillars nor St. Gauden's blush-promoting statuary decorated its blameless exterior, either for botch or betterment. No black closets fanged with sharp hooks and breathing pestilent mustiness lurked in its dreadful depths, threatening to precipitate a ministerial crisis around the conjugal hearth.

The man of far western enterprise, who goes forth with nothing but a few ounces of salt in one hand and a halter in the other to a career of sudden and certain prosperity, would sneer at a plan for his rustic villa of content so void of all embellishment. The rampant eastern egotist, saturated with profound, uncanny mysticism, would echo the supercilious sentiment.

Guiltless of tapestry, even of paper tattooed into isosceles triangles or fretted with peafowl tintages, were its walls. Nay, vetoed were walls indeed, save when some mad riot of sumptuousness inspired an imitation of "society"--that medley of metaphysics and flirtations, of fashion, vanity, jealousy, altruism, rheumatism and gastronomy which is principally intent on beating tom-toms and dodging jim-jams. Then, hoisted above its normal altitude, like sliding roof of clover rick, a rough joinery of boards or logs or turf, breasted it up four-square to all the gusts of Boreas and the moral agencies of southern Arkansaw.

No door-plate shimmered, purporting, in gothic undecipherables gnarly as Pharaoh's lean kine, to name the occupant. Good cause, forsooth; none better! No door, on which a faintest shimmer could be hung, graced the wide frontal vacancy. Who entered here, though his brow were tall and his spirit strong, left his _bon-ton_ behind. Style, root of much heart-break and hen-peck, was smitten as by the stony paw of a sphinx. Fit symbols of existence in this pretenseless home were the broken column and the gates ajar.

Destitute also was the Shelter Tent of the pompous excrescence of chimneys, and their accessories,--of the parlor mantel, laden with sea-shells and aconite pellets,--of the stove in the guest chamber, voluble in prophecies of smokeless combustion, unhopeful as the courting of a grass-widow with an inchoate right of dower to forty acres of swamp land in a school section,--of the hanging book-shelf, heavy with dull fiction and smeared with poetical syrup. No chimney was there to witness the woes of perplexed Santa Claus. No chimney was there to gaze with wide-eyed wonder on the tragedy which ensues when Uncle Reuben blows out the gas. No chimney was there, with open gusty grate, more dreary than the lignite desolation of the bad lands.

Minus likewise were chandeliers, with their brazen sheen,--mementos of dismal experience with colicky infants at paregoric time,--mementos of sweltering social hilarity, when perspiration is unconfined and heels smite corns on toes that groan again,--mementos of genteel functions, where pink and purple ice cream circulates at par, and French-plate diamonds flash on palpitating bosoms perilously exposed to the weather.

Chandeliers were extinct and non-existent. Candles stuck in bayonets sufficed. There was light enough for a nightly prosecution of the poker industry and for overproduction of the chestnut crop. And even after taps, when utter darkness reigned, there was no danger of bumping one's head against the upper berth.

No walls of partition parceled off the Shelter Tent into spaces conventionalized to pecular functions. Aristocracy of exclusion and seclusion there were none, but broad and limpid democracy of exposure to all curiousness, though searching as croton oil. Hence drawing-room, boudoir and kitchen, oratory, refectory, and lavatory were all in one. But only in alternation, since the contracted area precluded simultaneousness as well as latitudinarianism. There was no disgraceful scramble for the apartment with southern exposure and all modern conveniences. There was little risk of bringing a blush of modesty to the veteran's bronzed and massive cheek. Partitions would have been useless as a pop factory in the bluegrass region. Each tenant was the peer in imperturbability of a male divorcee in Connecticut, digging clams to earn alimony.

Area was not its boast. A well equipped farm on the Little Missouri is said to consist of a due allowance of sunny sky, a pair of bob-sleds and a gopher hole. There naturally prevail the financial views which demand a currency based on pig-iron, short-ribs, hoop-poles and wheat screenings.

No lightning-rod adorned its frowning pediment, lank and fatiguing reminder of Ben Franklin,--thrifty printer,--and his kite, such as never was before in air or tree; also of the glib and evanescent vendor whose monopoly of all fascinations was only equaled by his absolute prostration of all moral attributes. That convoluted metallic insufficiency thrust not its aluminum barb above the crest of this domicile, like a reed shaken by the wind, mute witness to each passer of the owner's sweet credulity.

Trifling in weight, as was each segment of the Shelter Tent, unappreciable addition to individual burden, and willingly borne for the increased facility and certainty of bivouac, the aggregate relief to the department of transportation was like shriving a bad man's conscience of crime or lifting a fear from a coward's soul. The reduction of regimental trains from thirteen wagons to three was as efficient in ultimate results as the withdrawal of guards from confederate poultry-coops and the obliteration of zouave jackets; possibly more so.

The Shelter Tent was the after-glow of an understudy, so to speak, but it was a potent helper in the grand tragedy. It came into war annals greeted with a welcome warm as that vouchsafed on election night to the missing precinct that brings the necessary majority. This welcome was tendered when use brought due appreciation of its value, not earlier. Its original introduction was as sensational as when John Barleycorn comes to town, and brings his blizzard with him. Its first arrival met with jeers; with hot reviling; with barkings imitative of indignant dog, or brayings as of disgusted donkey; with cursings such as tear the curser's lungs to ragged tatters; with mellowing miracles of profanest speech, horizonless trans-continental sentences of words hurled endlong, overthwart, each word a stab or blister; with mutiny and riot ludicrous to recall. But all in vain. Reeking language, that put immortal souls in peril, availed nothing.

The Shelter Tent came for use, and it came to stay. Orders were imperative and discipline was supreme. Jeering, barking, braying, cursing, rioting were as futile as the purr of a Vassar kitten at the advent of a long-haired æsthete, wearing an air of discontent and a coat with efflorescent elbows.

It was prescribed and issued. The average visitor to Washington is welcomed to his nation's proud capital with loud acclaim by the hack fiend and the hotel runner, both Afro-American. The Shelter Tent was welcomed with corresponding warmth, as aforesaid, when its utility began to materialize. Out into the pink and pearl of morning sunshine, or into a sour, dreary, morning drizzle, step from it the tentmates of a night's camp. They were proud as the Jerseyman who boasts his descent "from the family of Smith-Smiths, connected by a syphon." They were free from the proverbial weary, next-morning-condition of civil life, for sleep profound had knitted up the raveled stocking heel of care. Each carried a moiety of homestead folded in the knapsack strapped to his stalwart form, and stepped out with a sublime song of triumph on his lips and in his heart. Each carried his own house. He also laughed at his own jokes with a loud tenor tone. Marvel of more than this marvelous facility of home-shifting was our inimitable volunteer. He bore constantly also his year's wardrobe and his week's provender, toothsome (though less tender) as planked whitefish from the cold and classic Assiniboin. Likewise, his drink, his tools tonsorial, manicurial and dentifric, such as fate vouchsafed and regulations permitted. In addition he bore his bed, his financial capital and surplus, his arsenal of projectiles, his weapons of offense, his instruments of torture, and his implements of toil. Strength considered, no pack-horse carried a weightier lading, and yet the soldier was denied the dull, dumb creature's exemption from rational accountability.

Thus freighted with belligerent melange the mobilized veteran marches all day, with his thinking bayonet at his side, his logical musket on his shoulder, and his profane vocabulary held in measurable subjection, the nominative agreeing with the verb occasionally by accident.

On through hot and bitter limestone dust that blanches all his cuticle, then reddens eyes and nose and mouth with unsanctified inflammation. On through floundering quagmires of yellow mud that settles into slush, then slumps into slime; vivid parallel to the moral collapse of a white-souled commissary warmed by beams of opportunity and trodden by hoofs of temptation.

On through heat excruciating or cold unendurable; through rain, sleet, hail,--storm's dread alternations of discomfort,--all the lengthening day, his trousers shrinking to knee-pants as he trudges along. On, footsore and halting, each nerve a roadway for pain's burning steps, each bone racked with rheumatic twinges, until night brings the limping turnpike tourist to a welcome resting-place.

The bivouac then, and full-orbed glory of the Shelter Tent! Matchless for adaptation, it is pitched as soon as ranks are broken. The landscape whitens with swift magic like a Monday's clothes-line billowy with confidential raiment. The tentmates join the sundered segments, and with sticks or stalks or poles, or, lacking these, with bayonet and gun and ramrod, lift the flexile sheet to the required angle, and lo! their dwelling stands confessed; no spectacular monstrosity, but compact, cleanly and stylish as a salad dressed in oil.