Part 9

Grand as was their heroism, noble as were their deeds, the Union soldiers have little patience with the rhetoric of war-boasters which have caused nearly as much suffering throughout the country in recent years as the melodies of "After the Ball is Over," or "Over the Garden Wall." Some of this rhetoric is over-ripe, like the new school of fiction, in other cases it pumps beautiful incidents from a deep capacious imagination, painfully void of veracity. But at any rate no untoward vauntings proceed from this unconsidered trifle of that epoch, neglected proletariat of tabernacles belligerent, the fleered and flouted Shelter Tent.

To historians with the lenses of judgment in correct focus, its functions in the splendid totality of achievement were by no means unimportant, although hitherto almost wholly unacknowledged. A war-scarred relic of it now, even if covering Carlyle's "most shriveled, wind-dried, dyspeptic, chill-shivering individual, a professor of life-weariness" (a tramp), would be more thrilling to the eye and heart of patriotism than a dozen shining granite monuments raised to commemorate forgiven but unforgetable rebellion. This is the reason for these tears.

Tattered and blackened but serviceable still, type of much else whereon we might perhaps with gain philosophize, the humble but priceless Shelter Tent was borne to the rendezvous by glad warriors returning in triumph, and legally mustered out. The war was ended; its work was done. No further seek its usufruct to discern. Its career was as tame as a typewritten love-letter. The receipt of a depot quartermaster was its sole and all-sufficient obituary.

Vanished from the receding perspective of our experience is the Shelter Tent--vanished from sight, but precious in memory forever. With it went the golden age of the republic; with it went our comradeship of trial and danger. After it came the new heaven and new earth to our redeemed, regenerated country. It has gone. And already, for more than half the soldiery of the grand army of the Union, it has been replaced by that low, green canopy whose curtain never outward swings.

DRESS PARADE

IV

Any scheme of war which omits the stately ceremonial of Dress Parade from among its essential elements is scandalously unsymmetric. The military science is of pre-classical antiquity, its roots shattering the sarcophagi of Cadmus, and Darius, and Ptolemy, and Tubal Cain--penetrating even the caves of the troglodyte and the gravel-beds of the trilobite and the saurians. Ripening ages have at last disclosed the imperative demand of a frequent assembly and orderly arrangement of troops for show and inspection just as the evolution of a parson requires the cultivation of orthography, etymology, surplice and orthodoxy.

The problem as to who put down the rebellion, hitherto more recondite than that of the precession of the equinoxes or of the invention of the kindergarten, and infinitely provocative of type-written rhetoric, has at last been solved! It was the boy in blue, his mother, and the girl he left behind him. Only the first had or could have the right to vote; the others had the higher right to be excused from voting. But all were in the conflict, and each furnished a demonstrable quota of heroic endeavor which crystallized into grand achievement. The first did the fighting; the second did the praying; the third supplied the inspiration.

The first effort of a regiment at observance of the tactical symposium termed Dress Parade marked an era in its annals which was always thereafter recurred to with prickling sensations at the roots of the hair and a revolving propensity in the pit of the stomach. How it was ever accomplished, endured, and survived was a mystery fathomless as the craft of a Christianized and deodorized savage.

The component parts of this approaching cosmorama may, with profit, be inspected separately.

The enlisted recruit, only a fortnight removed from the fresh milk and feather beds of home, is already jaundice-smitten, until the white of his eye shows quite golden-roddish and sun-flowery. In his aspect we discern the wisdom of one who is seventeen years old for the first time, and duly appreciates the fact. In his liver, quinine is already wrestling with calomel for the supremacy, even as in his soul remembered moral precepts are already summoned to mount guard against the wiles of sin. He is sugared o'er with the pale cast of virtue--stern in his rectitude as the senator who has never betrayed a trust. His black eyes duly sparkle in æsthetic harmony with his curly, coaly hair, as he warbles new-fledged patriotic melodies with fervid sincerity. And he views the imminence of experience in human carnage with the blind insouciance of a political party that is being led through a slaughter-house to an open grave.

If by inscrutable preordination the chevrons of a corporal or sergeant decorate his flapping sleeves, the agonies of his self-consciousness are unutterably intensified. His picturesque, variegated and altogether incomprehensible strut, is positively unique. His awkwardness spreads and sprouts and amplifies and ramifies. To witness his embarrassment is enough to break the heart of an orphan. His tendency to do the right thing at the wrong time and wrong thing at all times may be predicted with the precision of an exact science.

His responsibilities are enormous; his perplexities are terrible; his woes are innumerable; he is dejected, afflicted, tormented. He is helpless as a lawyer hurling maxims of abstract justice ruthlessly in the face of evidence. He is a non-commissioned officer. That is to say: an unquoted quota; an unenumerated numeral; a non-existent existence; not an officer at all!

The lieutenants, with authority varying inversely as the square of their bumptiousness, are loud in their pretensions as the howl of a defeated candidate who has fallen outside his breastworks. Mrs. Solomon in all her several hundred glories was not elaborated like one of these. Invincible Chicago, with the biggest and tallest Masonic temple in the world, by thunder, is not so proud. The triumphant statesman who has evolved a barley schedule that will put the robber barons of western Iowa to open shame, is no more inflated. The congressman who has exposed a rival's political armor-plate, honeycombed with blowholes, is less exultant. State linked to state, in goodly fate, in mart and mint and mine; in rolling plain of golden grain or toss of plumy pine--none of these could fabricate a more colossal national glorification than these imposing subalterns, with ravenous tools of butchery girt on their semi-erect forms, and fiercely fretful lest the rebellion should be suppressed before they could debouch upon the ensanguined scenery.

The captain is big with the fate of empire. He has dwelt upon the agonizing spectacle of his beloved country bleeding at every vein, not to mention the carotid and celluloid arteries, _et cetera_, until he has accumulated an amount of frenzy which only blood of a highly oxygenized quality and in most generous libations can ever expect to satisfy. The candidate with a separate and distinct set of views on all crucial questions for each county in his district may pass muster on the civil arena, but this centurion is vehemently in earnest. He has supped on a thousand horrors--remember the number.

His eye is one gleaming chrysolite. His lips are pink and luminous, dripping phosphorescent formulas in characterizing the assailants of the flag. His mustache bristles with fury like the rays of an arc lamp shooting pulsations of glow into unresisting darkness. His nose sniffs battles from afar and threatens direful death in each resounding sneeze. His brow is knit into knots of perplexity by chasing tactic combinations which canter at will through the vasty thought-clefts of his gray matter, foreboding a fatty degeneration thereof. His fervid soul thirsts for the hour when he shall lead his eager men to regions where bounteous crops of glory are harvested semi-monthly from valor's fertile fields. No pent up Schenectady contracts his grand ambition. But his torch is illuminative, not strictly conflagrational, after all.

The major and lieutenant-colonel blush bright crimson with the burden of unwonted dignities. These bucolic ex-potentates from outlying precincts, cross-road lawyers, perhaps, of the pig-replevin, breachy-steer class, are limp supernumeraries in all this busy ebullition. Marvel not that they mutter unprintable ideas as they pass along. Each has now a clawing consciousness of his approximation to the infinitely little--the cube root of nothing. Each has squandered sixty dollars, the savings of a lifetime, in the purchase of the prescribed habiliments.

Now both find themselves eclipsed by a colored sport among the on-lookers, who displays a loud check suit and screaming scarlet necktie, enameled white shoes with black tips, and tall white hat swathed in a broad black band. Suppressed and quenched they stand, half-daft, with a glimmering recognition of their own marvelous inutility; nerveless as the ecclesiastical victim of Christmas generosity who has seventeen turkeys, in various stages of decomposition, lying on his back porch.

But the colonel! Great son of Mars, swathed in fire and thunder! Every sublime and momentous prerogative of this illustrious occasion finds its prescriptive focus in his person. Lucifer, son of the morning--he will rise to the occasion or break a nerve in the effort! Lifted by approved, unchallenged primacy above all mediocre surroundings, he stands wrapped in the rampant amplitude of his own perpendicularity. His dignity is frigid as the icicles on the fateful blizzard's beard in those frosty northwest winters when the coyote ceases yelping and the gopher is at rest. His serenity can calmly smile at Satan's wrath and force a frowning fraud. He speaks an imitation West Point idiom with the Tippecanoe accent, and his voice rivals in resonance the venturous wild-fowl honking high in air. His mental endowments have never been enervated by book gluttony and lesson bibbing. He is no patent process product of enlightened educational methods. He is a symmetrical outgrowth, so accepted and recognized by all, including himself.

Physically and intellectually he looms and glooms and towers. On him all glances are centered; toward him all thoughts are stretched; for him all hearts palpitate. Hector arming for the siege of Troy was boy's play in comparison. The embryo soldiery regard him with pride; admiring citizens look on him with poorly concealed reverence. He has already trimmed his corns to fit a major-general's shoes. Consequently his shoulders stiffen with pardonable arrogance; his gaze flashes soul-satisfaction in radiant smileful beams, and the ginger is hot in his mouth.

These are the ingredients out of which, in the alembic of his genius, the adjutant, perspiring like a wedding guest come to celebrate the climax of a happy disaster, must fuse a Dress Parade. His task is difficult as that of teaching a war ship how to swim. These are the bristling units, which, when he swings his commands around and over them, will submit their centripetence to his awecompelling centrifugence. They are flexible as a rubber currency, that can be expanded and inflated at will, if handled with care. But in the end they will stand approximately aligned, ready to skip on light bombastic toe, to wheel and whirl, to march or halt, to strike or slay.

Let not the drum major, gaudy as a calico cat, and his melodious cohort, be forgotten. This cohort may be composed of small boys executing Yankee Doodle with variations on snare drums and whistling sticks, or of fluffy adults, agitating the atmosphere with resonant trombone and shrieking piccolo. That is largely a matter of natural selection,--that is to say, of accident. But it is always obtrusive as a mourning costume expressly designed to advertise a quenchless woe and save expenses generally. And it is always marshaled by a fierce brobdingnag mounting a tall bearskin shako, and twirling a nickel-plated besom staff with the dapper legerdemain of a sword-swallower.

This so-called "band" is as imperative in the saturnalia of Dress Parade as a demijohn in an Iowa closet. In that province water that contains only 32,000 microbes to the cubic inch has been scientifically approved as a beverage--provided just enough brandy is added to take the cruelty out of the water. Without the band, parade would be a piebald abstraction, unthinkablest of impossibles. With it obstacles vanish and everything bursts into buoyant feasibleness and stem-winding accuracy, wrapped in the indwelling beatitude of conscious grandeur.

Music hath charms to smooth the savage breast. The reason why I can not tell. In truth, strange to say, there are many other mysteries connected with our mental operations and inspirational impulses which are equally insoluble. The processes and boundaries of emotion in the soul of a Wyoming senator, when her back hair comes down in the midst of an eloquent peroration, are inscrutable and unfathomable. The bill for an act entitled an act to amend an act is likely then to lose its place on the calendar. But as a rule, the processes and boundaries of thought are immutably conditional. Its formulas were petrified in Aristotle, for man, with all his amazing progress in science and inventions, still abides a little lower than the angels, his goods never quite up to sample. The intellect pauses at a distance from ultimate truth, dimly gleaming through the hush of a large gloom, and painfully cries for external help.

Explosions often result from suddenly injecting thought into a vacant mind. Some syllogisms are fallacious as a decoy watermelon stuffed with paris green. The imagination may roam uncurbed through infinite realms, but reason is horizoned by an adjacent pale over which it can neither leap nor soar. Beyond this boundary philosophy can not direct man's tottering steps; further his unblazed path will lead into the vagaries and discords and peopled torments of lunacy, unless he permits faith to begin where reason ends. When a venerable pundit, formulating huge installments of lexicography, assures you that he knows it all, be careful where you repeat the statement. Tell it not in Gath; tell it to the marines--but break it gently, cautiously, or by the beard of the prophet you will find small credence.

Necessary as it has been, dominant as it has been, military talent is, after all, one of the lower forms of genius. It is not conversant with the highest or the richest intellectual pursuits. It may exist to perfection deficient in profound and liberal thinking, in imagination and taste, in the noblest energies and inspirations of life.

Hugo says that at Waterloo each square was a volcano attacked by a thunder-cloud; the lava fought with the lightning. Their employment demands none of the finer fibers of intellect or loftier aspirations of the soul. Even the "business" statesman of well recognized shrewdness and well advertised piety, entrusted with cabinet portfolios on the theory that public office is a private usufruct, is likely to tread the higher realms of intelligence with more certain footsteps than the Wellingtons or Jubal Earlys of bellicose notability. And Susan B. Anthony insists to this day that the little affair between her younger brother Mark Antony and Cleopatra has been grossly exaggerated for base political purposes.

Parade differs from review as camp differs from campaign. The one is solemnity, the other is vivacity. Positive parade, comparative review, superlative battle, are the three degrees of comparison in war's activities. They are respectively tableau, melodrama and tragedy of systematic warfare. As ivory must germinate in the elephant's trunk before poker chips can materialize, so parade and review must antedate the battle agony.

Parade discloses the proficiency of a command in decorum, alignment and manual of arms. Review and inspection test its skill in evolution, as well as in equipment, accoutrement, care of weapons and general efficiency. Battle brings out all the qualities which drills, parades, reviews and inspections have developed or exhibited. During parades and reviews the officers come to the front; in battle they go to the rear. This accounts for the seeming mystery that so many still survive to tell the tale, and to tell it in such bewildering variety.

Daily Dress Parade being enjoined explicitly by regulations, becomes per force a vested right of citizen observers, and the periodic irritant of lethargic soldiery. But its first dainty freshness, before a state of lethargy has supervened and suppurated, threatens the maddening frenzy that drowns all sorrow in ginger ale. Its occurrence then brings whimsical complications equal to that of sweetening a whisky ring with a sugar trust; mad alternations of hope, elation, trepidation and horror; a synthesis like few!

That two and two make five is a mathematical preposterosity; that early experiments in Dress Parade should be a success is a military ditto, with extra emphasis on the antepenultimate. Let the heathen rage and the plutocrats imagine a vain thing! Here is a seriousness of facetiousness that would discourage a comedy star in full apogee.

As the fateful hour draws near, dim premonitions of coming divertisements rapidly multiply. Dress Parade is about to materialize, and the air is electric with expectancy, as when Corbett recognizes the belligerence of Persimmons, hires a typewriter, and opens hostilities in due form. Indications of the advent of an event worthy the delicate touch of Bjornstene Bjeminison's poetic fancy, are discerned. Matrons and maidens cluster and flutter and twitter athwart the designated color line. The matrons are superb, and the maidens are about to become historic--they are the girls who are to get left behind.

Accompanying them are their attendant male civilians, disgruntled as an oldest son who has ceased to be the only child by a large majority. They feel like a bunch of shop-worn lower-case ciphers just ready to be edited into the hell-box. They are keenly self-conscious of total eclipse in this martial splendor's plethoric incandescence. The rippling tee-hee of maidenly merriment rasps roughly on their ears, provoking wrath in the collar. Their cheerfulness matches that of a quarter of beef on its journey from dissecting table to chill-room.

Along company streets, redolent with intoxicating fumes of bean soup and loyalty up to date, manifest signs of preparation obtrude. According to the accepted congressional code, nothing succeeds like success, when one is successful in succeeding himself. Even the demagogues, who love the people in stump speeches at ten dollars per speech, sometimes achieve success of that kind.

A genuine military success requires painstaking method, as these premonitions indicate. There are glimpses of toilet, glimmers of gun barrel, suggestions of ablution, flashes of bayonet. There are dashes of shoe-polishing and hair-brushery--mad wrestle with a Paderewski growth of foliage, here and there. A tent fly lifts and the process of creating a contemptuous curl of mustache greets the penetrating vision. Bright steel rammers gleam in the glare of the giddy avenue. Advance individuals, nervously premature in completed canonicals, appear; then squads, groups, platoons--entire companies. Other things may be late and worms may chew them, but the scythe and hour-glass are always on time. So is Dress Parade.

Companies are aligned and files are counted off. Sergeants, surcharged with a rude, luminous unshaken faith in the republic, tumble stumblingly into their positions. Corporals, sensitive as the bulb of nerve fiber at the end of a cat's whisker, are given the merry hand with a marble heart.

The captain, already disliked by the enemies he has made, flings himself to the perilous front. Ranks are right faced and levant longitudinally, at a modified gallopade, toward the aforementioned color line. Here, after miscellaneous entanglements, unequaled since cable and trolley emancipated the mule from tram car servitude, a measurable coherence is secured. The companies form by some sort of incomprehensible intuition of incidence, on four or five alleged "guides." These stand with inverted muskets and quaking knees, a soft spot in the head and a hot spot in the cheek, robust delineations of despairing imbecility. Their terrors are tremendous, reminding one of that sweetly solemn village hour, when curfew rings and small boys hunt their haunts.

The colonel is now suddenly disclosed. He has dropped, unseen, presumably from the propitious heavens, into his allotted station, some forty paces in front of the center. At any rate, he is there. And if I had a hundred dollars--as I had once, though I may never look upon its like again--I would wager it all that he wishes he were somewhere (anywhere) else.

He is one of those lingering men whose minds go off with a wet fuse. Like one dazed, he gazes amazed; and a gaze at him is worth the whole cost of admission. He wears a little bunch of whiskers on his chin, and his nose has the rising inflection. His warlike air and attitude are prophecies of the day when Greece shall give Turkey a basting. He poses statuesque, with folded arms, head aslant, one hip elevated and both legs trembling. His make-up rivals that of a special Chinese envoy with the yellowest of jackets and peacockiest of tails. He carries a frown over the bridge of his nose that portends deep concealment of valuable information as to his own consequence, unknown to the world at large. That frown, however, is only borrowed for the occasion; at heart he is humble as the Chicago aristocrat who has squandered the price of a car of pork in the purchase of a bogus Venus. He poses, with arms folded _a la_ Bonaparte over his Napoleonic stomach. He poses like the last erect relic of a forest, colossal, leafless, lifeless and sublime. He looks proud as the weary mechanic greeted on his front porch at eve by a shining galaxy of posterity. He has a right to be proud; he is the colonel. Bring forth the royal diadem and make him a present of it.

Meanwhile the adjutant is not idle. Far otherwise. His duties are complicated as the new quadruplex telegraphic system for the transmission of string-fiend fakes. He imitates the gyrations of a cyclone funnel in his delirious attempts to frame one geometric tangent out of ten miscellaneous arcs, with unassimilable _radii_. His processes resemble a lurid, revolving nightmare of St. Valentine's day in the morning. He foams and fumes; he shouts and signals; he gesticulates; he genuflects; he perambulates. He pleads for correct formation as pallid Maryland corn fields plead for rain and fertilizers. His voice is softened by the sweet, feathery fluff on his upper lip, but it reaches far. His perplexities equal those of the man who went down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell among hotel runners. But as in the cruel abattoir the fated bullock glances at the sticker's cold, callous, calculating eye and bows to the inevitable, so the willing, though awkward, soldiery yield at last to the adjutant's persistent insistence. He finally establishes a distant resemblance to the shortest space between two given markers. The markers introvert their marks and fall into desuetude--and the mummery is duly inaugurated.