There was one man in our corps, a good-natured, agreeable person, a professional politician, who astonished me by the fact that however starved we might be, he had always a flask of whisky wherewith to treat his friends! Where or how he always got it I never could divine. But in America every politician always has whisky or small change wherewith to treat. Always. Money was generally of little use, for there was rarely anything to buy anywhere. I soon developed here and there an Indian-like instinct in many things, and this is indeed deep in my nature. I cannot explain it, but it is there. I became expert when we approached a house at divining, by the look of waggons or pails or hencoops, whether there was meal or bread or a mill anywhere near. One day I informed our lieutenant that a detachment of rebel cavalry had recently passed. He asked me how I knew it. I replied that rebel horses, being from mountainous Virginia, had higher cocks and narrower to their shoes, and one or two more nails than ours, which is perfectly true. And where did I learn that? Not from anybody. I had
noticed the difference as soon as I saw the tracks, and guessed the cause. One day, in after years in England, I noticed that in coursing, or with beagles, the track of a gypsy was exactly like mine, or that of all Americans—that is, Indian-like and straight-forward. I never found a Saxon-Englishman who had this step, nor one who noticed such a thing, which I or an Indian would observe at once. Once, in Rome, Mr. Story showed me a cast of a foot, and asked me what it was. I replied promptly, “Either an Indian girl’s or an American young lady’s, whose ancestors have been two hundred years in the country.” It was the latter. Such feet lift or leap, as if raised every time to go over entangled grass or sticks. Like an Indian, I instinctively observe everybody’s ears, which are unerring indices of character. I can sustain, and always could endure, incredible fasts, but for this I need coffee in the morning. “Mark Twain”—whom I saw yesterday at his villa, as I correct this proof—also has this peculiar Indian-like or American faculty of observing innumerable little things which no European would ever think of. There is, I think, a great deal of “hard old Injun” in him. The most beautiful of his works are the three which are invariably bound in silk or muslin. They are called “The Three Daughters, or the Misses Clemens.”
It occurred to me, after I had recorded the events of our short but truly vigorous and eventful campaign, to write to R. W. Gilder and ask him—quid memoriæ datum est—“what memories he had of that great war, wherein we starved and swore, and all but died.” There are men in whose letters we are as sure to find genial life as a spaccio di vino or wine-shop in a Florentine street, and this poet-editor is one of them. And he replied with an epistle not at all intended for type, which I hereby print without his permission, and in defiance of all the custom or courtesy which inspires gentlemen of the press.
“May 8th, 1893.
“Editorial Department, The Century Magazine,
“Union Square, New York.“My Dear Leland: How your letter carries me back! Do you know that one night when I was trudging along in the dark over a road-bed where had been scattered some loose stones to form a foundation, I heard you and another comrade talking me over in the way to which you refer in your letter? Well, it was either you or the other comrade who said you had given me something to eat, and I know that I must have seemed very fragile, and at times woe-begone. I was possibly the youngest in the crowd. I was nineteen, and really enjoyed it immensely notwithstanding.
“I remember you in those days as a splendid expressor of our miseries. You had a magnificent vocabulary, wherewith you could eloquently and precisely describe our general condition of starvation, mud, ill-equippedness, and over-work. As I think of those days, I hear reverberating over the mountain-roads the call, ‘Cannoneers to the wheels!’ and in imagination I plunge knee-deep into the mire and grab the spokes of the caisson. [266a]
“Do you remember the night we spent at the forge? I burnt my knees at the fire out-doors, while in my ears was pouring a deluge from the clouds. I finally gave it up, and spent the rest of the night crouching upon the fire-bed of the forge itself, most uncomfortably.
“You will remember that we helped dig the trenches at the fort on the southern side of the river from Harrisburg, [266b] and that one section of the battery got into a fight near that fort; nor can you have forgotten when Stuart Patterson’s hand was shot off at Carlisle. As he passed me, I heard him say, ‘My God, I’m shot!’ That night, after we were told to retire out of range of the cannon, while we were lying under tree near one of the guns, an officer called for volunteers to take the piece out of range. I stood up with three others, but seeing and hearing a shell approach, I cried out, ‘Wait a moment!’—which checked them. Just then the shell exploded within a yard of the cannon. If we had not paused, some of us would surely have been hit. We then rushed out, seized the cannon, and brought it out of range.
“By the way, General William F. Smith (Baldy Smith) has since told me that he asked permission to throw the militia (including ourselves) across one of Lee’s lines of retreat. If he had been permitted to do so, I suppose you and I would not have been in correspondence now.
“You remember undoubtedly the flag of truce that came up into the town before the bombardment began. The man was on horseback and had the conventional white flag. The story was that Baldy Smith sent word ‘that if they wanted the town they could come and take it.’ [267] I suppose you realise that we were really a part of Meade’s right, and that we helped somewhat to delay the rebel left wing. Do you not remember hearing from our position at Carlisle the guns of that great battle—the turning-point of the war? [268]
“I could run on in this way, but your own memory must be full of the subject. I wish that we could sometime have a reunion of the old battery in Philadelphia. I have a most distinct and pleasant remembrance of your brother—a charming personality indeed, a handsome refined face and dignified bearing. I remember being so starved as to eat crackers that had fallen on the ground; and I devoured, too, wheat from the fields rubbed in the hands to free it from the ear. . . .
“Sincerely,
R. W. Gilder.“P.S.—I could write more, but you will not need it from me.”
Truly, I was that other comrade whom Gilder overheard commending him, and it was I who gave him something to eat, I being the one in camp who looked specially after two or three of the youngest to see that they did not starve, and who doctored the invalids.
I here note, with all due diffidence, that Mr. Gilder chiefly remembers me as “a splendid expressor of our miseries, with a magnificent vocabulary” wherewith to set forth fearful adversities. I have never been habitually loquacious in life; full many deem me deeply reticent and owl-like in my taciturnity, but I “can hoot when the moon shines,” nor is there
altogether lacking in me in great emergencies a certain rude kind of popular eloquence, which has—I avow it with humility—enabled me invariably to hold my own in verbal encounters with tinkers, gypsies, and the like, among whom “chaff” is developed to a degree of which few respectable people have any conception, and which attains to a refinement of sarcasm, originality, and humour in the London of the lower orders, for which there is no parallel in Paris, or in any other European capital; so that even among my earliest experiences I can remember, after an altercation with an omnibus-driver, he applied to me the popular remark that he was “blessed if he didn’t believe that the gemman had been takin’ lessons in language hof a cab-driver, and set up o’ nights to learn.” But the ingenious American is not one whit behind the vigorous Londoner in “de elegant fluency of sass,” as darkies term it, and it moves my heart to think that, after thirty years, and after the marvellous experiences of men who are masters of our English tongue which the editor of the Century must have had, he still retains remembrance of my oratory!
At last we were marched and railroaded back to Philadelphia. I need not say that we were welcome, or that I enjoyed baths, clean clothes, and the blest sensation of feeling decent once more. Everything in life seemed to be luxurious as it had never been before. Luxuries are very conventional. A copy of Prætorius, for which I paid only fifteen shillings, was to me lately a luxury for weeks; so is a visit to a picture gallery. For years after, I had but to think of the Emergency to realise that I was actually in all the chief conditions of happiness.
Feeling that, although I was in superb health and strength, the seeds of typhoid were in me, I left town as soon as possible, and went with my wife, her sister, and two half-nieces, or nieces by marriage, and child-nephew, Edward Robins, to Cape May, a famous bathing-place by the ocean. One of the little girls here alluded to, a Lizzie Robins, then six years of age, is now well known as Elizabeth Robins Pennell, and “a
writer of books,” while Edward has risen in journalism in Philadelphia. There as I walked often eighteen or twenty miles a day by the sea, when the thermometer was from 90° to 100° in the shade, I soon worked away all apprehension of typhoid and developed muscle. One day I overheard a man in the next bathing-house asking who I was. “I don’t know,” replied the other, “but if I were he, I’d go in for being a prize-fighter.”