HUMOROUS INCIDENTS OF THE WAR.
The illustrations of this chapter are exact reproductions of cartoons published during the war in various newspapers and periodicals.
FUN FROM ENLISTMENT TO HONORABLE DISCHARGE—RECRUITS' EXCUSES—BULL RUN PLEASANTRIES—GREENHORNS IN CAMP—FUN WITH THE AWKWARD SQUAD—OFFICERS LEARNING THEIR BUSINESS—SENTRIES AND SHOULDER STRAPS—STORIES OF GRANT, LINCOLN, BUTLER, SHERMAN, ETC.—DUTCH, IRISH, AND DARKY COMEDY—EXPEDIENTS OF THE HOMESICK—ARMY CHAPLAINS—HOSPITAL HUMOR—GRANT'S "PIE ORDER"—"THROUGH VIRGINIA"—YANKEE GOOD NATURE AND PLUCK A BETTER STIMULANT THAN WHISKEY.
he hardships of campaigning, the sufferings of the hospital, the horrors of actual combat—none of these sufficed to keep down the irrepressible spirit of fun in the American soldier. From the day of his enlistment to the day of his discharge he did not cease to look upon the funny side of every situation, and the veterans of to-day talk more about the humor of the war than of privations and pitched battles. Wits in and out of the army said and did clever things, some of which have passed into the proverbs and idioms of the American people; and more than one distinguished "American humorist" laid the foundation of his reputation in connection with the war.
Humorous situations began at the very recruiting office, or the citizens' meeting which stimulated recruiting, and continued to the end of the service. It was at one of the meetings held in a New England village that the wife of a spirited citizen, whose patriotism consisted in brave words, said to him: "I thought you said you were going to enlist to-night." Well, he had thought better of it. "Take off those breeches, then, and give them to me, and I will go myself." There was not much prospect of "peace" for him in a life at home after that; so he went to the front. Countless excuses were offered by candidates for the draft in the hope of proving themselves physically disqualified for service. The man who had one leg too short was let off; but the man behind him, who pleaded that he had "both legs too short," failed to prove a double incapacity, and he wore the blue, and that creditably.
Officers who tarried too long in Washington on their way to the front were not seldom rendered uncomfortable by the remarks made to them or in their hearing. One who was eager for news from the first battle of Bull Run bought an "extra" of a newsboy who was calling, "All about the battle!" Glancing over it, he shouted after the boy: "Here! I don't see any battle in this paper." "Don't you?" said the boy. "Well, you won't see any battle if you loaf around this hotel all the time." It was of the battle of Bull Run that a wit said, it was so popular it had to be repeated the very next year, to satisfy the public demand for it. And one of the participants in this first experience of the new army said: "At Bull Run we were told that the eyes of Washington were upon us; when we knew very well that what we were most anxious about was to get our eyes on Washington." It was said of the soldiers on both sides in that battle, that their guns trembled in their hands, so that if the enemy was dodging he was almost certain to be hit, and that the conclusion arrived at by the rearward experiments of both armies was that a soldier may retreat successfully from almost any position if only he starts in time. Thus the pleasantry of the day turned to account the "baptism of fire" of some of the bravest troops that ever wore blue or gray.
Once in camp, the school-boy spirit revelled in larks of every description. A few weeks of experience developed military manners and prepared the recruit to enjoy the greenness of the newer comers. On drill, a new recruit was sure to get his toes exactly where a "vet" wanted to drop the butt of his musket as he ordered arms, and if there was a mud-puddle within a yard of him he was sure to "dress" into it. The new men were sent to the officers' quarters on the most absurd errands, usually in quest of some luxury which, fresh from the comforts of home, they still regarded as a necessity. The drilling of the awkward squad was a never-ending source of amusement; for some men are constitutionally incapable of moving in a machine-like harmony with others, and these were continually out of place. One of them was a loose-jointed fellow from, say, Nantucket, who was so thorough a patriot that he was always longing for home, and he met every hardship and discouragement with a sigh and the wish that he was back in Nantucket. He was exceedingly awkward at drill. He seemed to make every movement on the "bias." One day, in responding to a command, he figured it out so badly as to find himself all alone, several yards away from the rest of the squad. All at sea, he said: "Captain, where ought I to be now?" The captain, thoroughly out of patience, shouted back: "Why, back in Nantucket, gol darn you!" There was the Irishman who said he had spent two years in the cavalry learning to turn his toes in, and two years in the infantry learning to turn his toes out. "Divil take such a sarvice," said he; "there's no plazing the blackguards, anyhow."
The drill jokes were not all on the men. The officers, who at the beginning were nonmilitary citizens like their soldiers, had their business to learn. Indeed, it was not an easy matter at first to preserve thorough discipline, because of the frequent equality, in military knowledge, between the officers and the men. It was said that the American soldier was perfectly willing to endure hardships, to fight, and if necessary to die, for his country; but the hardest thing for him to submit to was to be bossed around by his superior officer, who might, like enough, be his next-door neighbor at home. One captain, who had abandoned railroading for the war, in his excitement over the necessity of halting his men suddenly, true to his former calling, shouted out, "Down brakes!" And another, who had forgotten the command for breaking ranks, dismissed his company with the order, "Adjourn for rations!" It was a Georgian commandant of a Home Guard who, while showing his men off before a visiting officer, invented his own tactics on the basis of "common sense." His first order after falling in was, "In two ranks, git!" It was not long before he had his men pretty well mixed up; but, equal to the occasion, he shouted, "Disentangle to the front, march!" which was as effective as anything in "Hardee's Tactics." Drill sergeants were often peremptory fellows, and they sometimes called on their men to perform difficult feats. One under-sized sergeant had much trouble with an Irish recruit, whose enormous height had given him the habit of looking down, and he could not keep his chin up to the military angle. Finally the sergeant reached up to the Irishman's chin (for which he had to stand on tip-toe) and poked it up, saying, "That's the place for it; now don't let us see your head down again."—"Am I always to be like this, sergeant?" asked the recruit. "Yes, sir."—"Then I'll say good by to yez, sergeant, for I'll niver see yez again." It was a very fresh recruit who was found on his sentry post sitting down and cleaning his gun, which he had taken entirely to pieces. The officer who discovered him rebuked him sternly and asked, "Are you the sentinel here?"—"Well, I'm a sort of a sentinel."—"Well, I'm a sort of officer of the day."—"All right," said the undismayed recruit, "just hold on till I get my gun together, and I'll give you a sort of a salute."
The military rule that a sentry must challenge everybody, and not pass unchallenged even those whom he knew to be all right, was often as slow in taking possession of the officers' minds as those of the least experienced of the men. A full-uniformed lieutenant, much disgusted at the "Who goes there?" of one of his own company on guard, expressed his sentiments by indignantly exclaiming, "Ass!" To which the sentry promptly responded, "Advance, Ass, and give the countersign!" Not infrequently general officers and high dignitaries had experiences with the guards of their own camps. It is said that every great general in history has been halted by a guard, the approach of a well-known superior officer giving the sentry an opportunity of showing off his discipline. General McClellan was not only halted on a certain occasion, but forced to dismount and call up the officer of the guard before a sentry would let him pass. General Sherman, who used to see for himself what was going on among his men, under the incognito afforded by a rather unmilitary dress, once interfered with a teamster who was pounding a mule, and told him who he was. "Oh, that's played out!" said the mule driver; "every man that comes along here with an old brown coat and a stove-pipe hat claims to be General Sherman." This suggests the story of a mule driver in the army who was swearing at and kicking a span of balky mules, when the general, who was annoyed at his profanity, ordered him to stop. "Who are you?" said the mule driver. "I'm the commander of the brigade," said the general. "I'm the commander of these mules, and I'll do as I please, or resign, and you can take my place!" The general passed on. Even the President of the United States had his encounter with a guard, and was for a short time kept waiting outside General Grant's tent under the order, suggested by his somewhat clerical appearance, "No sanitary folks allowed inside!"
Lincoln always made friends among the soldiers. On one occasion he came on some men hewing logs for a hospital, and remarking, with a reminiscence of his rail-splitting days, that he "used to be pretty good on the chop," made the chips fly for a while like a veteran lumberman. The President's half-pathetic saying, that he had "no influence with this administration," has passed into history; but less familiar is his remark, when some one applied to him for a pass to go into Richmond, and he said, "I don't know about that; I have given passes to about two hundred and fifty thousand men to go there during the last two years, and not one of them has got there yet."
Ben Butler was credited with a lawyer-like disinclination to be cross-questioned when he gave orders. Word was brought to him that his favorite horse, "Almond-eye," had fallen into a ravine and been killed, and he called an orderly and told him to go to the ravine and skin the horse. "What, is Almond-eye dead?" asked the man. "Never you mind whether he is or not," said the general, "you obey orders." The man came back in about two hours and reported that he had finished. "Has it taken you all this time to skin a horse?" asked Butler. "Oh, no; it took me half an hour to catch him," was the reply. "You don't mean to say you killed him?" shouted the irate general. "My orders were to skin him," said the soldier, "and I obeyed them without asking any questions."
Officers and men alike showed much wit in their way of dealing with impossible or unwelcome orders. A lieutenant protested against an order to take a squad of men across a swamp where he knew the depth was enough to drown every man of them. He was sternly rebuked by his superior, who ordered him peremptorily to make the crossing, telling him that his requisition would be honored for whatever he might require for the purpose. So he made a requisition for "twenty men eighteen feet long to cross a swamp fifteen feet deep."
We will give another of the many similar stories. After a long march a captain ordered, as a sanitary precaution, that the men should change their under-shirts. The orderly sergeant suggested that half of the men had only one shirt each. The captain hesitated a moment and then said: "Military orders must be obeyed. Let the men, then, change with each other."
Orders against unauthorized foraging were very strict. A youthful soldier was stopped on his way into camp with a fine goose slung over his shoulder, and he was required to account for it. "Well," said he, "I was coming through the village whistling 'Yankee Doodle,' and this confounded rebel of a goose came out and hissed me; so I shot it."
"Where did you get that turkey?" said the colonel of the —— Texas regiment to one of his amiable recruits that came into camp with a fine bird.
"Stole it," was the laconic reply.
"Ah!" said the colonel, triumphantly, to a bystander, "you see my boys may steal, but they won't lie."
During a battle the interest in the work was so intense as to leave small room for fear, either of the enemy or of superior officers. An Irish private was ordered to take up the colors when the color-bearer was shot down. "By the holy St. Patrick, colonel," said he, "there's so much good shooting here, I haven't a minute's time to waste fooling with that thing."
The desire to get home for a few days developed much ingenuity among the enlisted men. "What do you want, Pat?" asked General Rosecrans, as he rode along the line, inquiring into the wants of his men. "A furlough!" said Pat. "How long has your sister been dead?" asked a sympathetic comrade of a soldier who had obtained a leave on account of the family trouble. "About ten years," was the cool reply. General Thomas asked a man who applied for leave to go and see his wife how long it was since he had seen her. "Over three months," was the answer. "Three months!" exclaimed the general; "why, I haven't seen my wife for three years!" "That may be," said the soldier, "but you see, general, me and my wife ain't o' that sort."
The "intelligent contraband," the irrepressible darky, is one of the few types of mankind that furnish as much fun in real life as on the stage. He was a source of constant amusement in the army. A colored refugee from the Confederate lines brought word, as the only news worth mentioning (referring to himself), that "a man in Culpeper lost a mighty valuable nigger this mornin'." The driver of a commissary wagon exemplified the general non-combativeness of his race, when, in describing his emotions during an attack on the train, he said he felt "like every hair of his head was a bugle, an' dey was all a-playin' 'Home, Sweet Home.'" An officer tried to induce his servant, who was a refugee, to enlist, saying he must trust the Lord to keep him safe. "Well," he said, "I did trust de Lord when I was tryin' to get into de Union lines, but I dun dare resk Him again!"
The army chaplain now and then ran against the rough soldier wit. One of them, who took a practical view of his responsibility for the souls of his regiment, welcomed some recruits with the suggestion that, having joined the army of their country, they should now also join the army of the Lord. "What bounty does He give?" was the irreverent rejoinder. Even in hospital the disposition to look on the humorous side of life—or of death—never forsook men. One who had lost three fingers held up the maimed member and sorrowfully regretted that he "never could hold a full hand again." A pale-faced sufferer in a hospital near a large city was asked by a visiting lady if she could not do something for him. No. Could she not bathe his head? "You may if you want to very much," he replied; "but if you do, you will be the fourteenth lady that has bathed my head this morning." It was an Irish surgeon who remarked that "the man who has lost his finger makes more noise about it than the man who has lost his head." A nurse was shocked one morning to find two attendants noisily hammering and sawing at one end of a ward where a very sick man was lying. In reply to her questions, they said they were making a coffin. "Who for?" "Him"—pointing to the sick man. "Is he going to die?" she asked, much distressed. "The doctor says he is, an' I guess he knows what he give him!" It was a Confederate guerilla who comforted himself, while lying on his hospital cot, with the reflection, "I reckon I killed as many of them as they did of me."
A soldier was wounded by a shell at Fort Wagner. He was going to the rear. "Wounded by a shell?" some one asked. "Yes," he coolly answered. "I was right under the durned thing when the bottom dropped out."
The occurrences in the enemy's country, and stories that originated there, furnished no small portion of the humor that was current during the war. "Where does this road lead to?" asked the lieutenant in command of a reconnoitering party. "It leads to h——!" was the surly reply of the unregenerate rebel thus interrogated. "Well, by the appearance of the inhabitants of this country, I should judge that I'm most there," was the retort. An old man in Georgia was called upon to declare which side he took, and, uncertain as to the identity of his captors, he said: "I ain't took no side; but both sides hev took me!" It must have been his wife who said: "I ain't neither Secesh nor Union—jest Baptist."
The devotion of Southern women to the Confederacy has often been remarked. One of the minor officers of the army, who marched with Sherman to the sea, and who states that he tramped, all told, at least two thousand miles during the war through the South, says that he saw many Southern men who were loyal to the Union, and who regretted the secession of their respective States, but he saw only one Southern woman whom he even suspected to be Union in sentiment. He saw this woman during a foraging expedition in connection with the march to the sea. He had charge of a squad of thirteen men who had marched through the woods some distance away from the army. As they rounded a sharp curve in the road, they suddenly came upon a house almost covered with foliage. In front of the house, and only a few yards from the men, was a woman picking up chips. Her back was toward the soldiers, and she had not noticed their approach. The commanding officer motioned to his men to stop, and, tip-toeing up to the side of the woman, he put his arm around her waist and kissed her. Stepping back a pace or two, he waited for the bitter denunciation and abuse that he was sure would come. The woman, however, straightened herself up, looked at the officer for a moment, and then said slowly: "You'll find me right here every morning a-picking up chips." The officer said he strongly suspected that she was disloyal to the South.
| FUN IN CAMP. |
A military peculiarity of General Bragg's was touched on in the remark that, when he died and approached the gate of heaven and was invited in, the first thing he'd do would be to "fall back." Gen. W. T. Sherman never seemed to suit the Confederates, no matter what he did. One of the prisoners who fell into the hands of his army gave the following graphic expression of the Southern idea of the general: "Sherman gits on a hill, flops his wings and crows; then he yells out: 'Attention, creation! by kingdoms, right wheel, march!' And then we git!" It was a solitary relic left behind after one of Sherman's advances, that, communing with himself, said: "Well, I'm badly whipped and somewhat demoralized, but no man can say I am scattered."
Among the humorous miscellanies of the war, General Grant's "pie order" must have an immortal place. It was during Grant's early campaign in Eastern Missouri that a lieutenant in command of the advance guard inspired the mistress of a wayside house with exceptional alacrity in supplying the wants of himself and men by announcing himself to be Brigadier-General Grant. Later in the day the general himself came to the same house and was turned away with the information that General Grant and staff had been there that morning and eaten everything in the house but one pumpkin pie. Giving her half a dollar, he told her to keep that pie till he sent for it. That evening the army went into camp some miles beyond this place, and at the dress parade that was ordered, the following special order was published:
"HEADQUARTERS, ARMY IN THE FIELD.
"SPECIAL ORDERS, NO. —.
"Lieutenant Wickfield, of the —th Indiana Cavalry, having on this day eaten everything in Mrs. Selvidge's house, at the crossing of the Ironton and Pocahontas and Black River and Cape Girardeau roads, except one pumpkin pie, Lieutenant Wickfield is hereby ordered to return with an escort of one hundred cavalry and eat that pie also.
"U. S. GRANT,
"Brigadier-General Commanding."
Virginia mud and Virginia swamps were celebrated by the invention of the response to the question, "Did you go through Virginia?" "Yes—in a number of places;" and the exclamation of the trooper who was fording a stream flanked by miles of swamp on either side: "Blowed if I don't think we have struck this stream lengthwise."
It is impossible here to attempt more than a suggestion of the combination of good nature and pluck that, all through the dreadful days of the war, rendered hardships endurable, lent courage to the faint-hearted, and cheered the low-spirited. "The humor of the war" was no mere ebullition of school-boy fun; it was as potent a factor in accomplishing the results of the war as powder and shot—a stimulant that carried men over hard places better than whiskey.