"I wasn't born to be a soldier," he said to me in after years. "Of course I can stand bullets and shells and all that, without flinching, just as any man must if he has any manhood in him, and as for hardship and starvation, why, a man who has self-control can endure them when duty demands it, but I never liked the business of war. Gold lace on my coat always made me feel as if I were a child tricked out in red and yellow calico with turkey feathers in my headgear to add to the gorgeousness. There is nothing intellectual about fighting. It is the fit work of brutes and brutish men. And in modern war, where men are organized in masses and converted into insensate machines, there is really nothing heroic or romantic or in any way calculated to appeal to the imagination. As an old soldier, you know how small a part personal gallantry plays in the machine work of war nowadays."
How Jeb Stuart Made a Major
Nevertheless, John Esten Cooke was a good soldier and a gallant one. At Manassas I happened to see him at a gun which he was helping to work and which we of the cavalry were supporting. He was powder-blackened and he had lost both his coat and his hat in the eagerness of his service at the piece; but during a brief pause in the firing he greeted me with a rammer in his hand and all the old cheeriness in his face and voice.
On Stuart's staff he distinguished himself by a certain laughing nonchalance under fire, and by his eager readiness to undertake Stuart's most perilous missions. It was in recognition of some specially daring service of that kind that Stuart gave him his promotion, and Cooke used to tell with delight of the way in which the great boyish cavalier did it.
"You're about my size, Cooke," Stuart said, "but you're not so broad in the chest."
"Yes, I am," answered Cooke.
"Let's see if you are," said Stuart, taking off his coat as if stripping for a boxing match. "Try that on."
Cooke donned the coat with its three stars on the collar, and found it a fit.
"Cut off two of the stars," commanded Stuart, "and wear the coat to Richmond. Tell the people in the War Department to make you a major and send you back to me in a hurry. I'll need you to-morrow."
When I visited him years afterwards at The Briars, his home in the Shenandoah Valley, that coat which had once been Stuart's, hung upon the wall, as the centerpiece of a collection of war relics, cherished with pride of sentiment but without a single memory that savored of animosity. The gentle, courteous, kindly man of letters who cherished these things as mementoes of a terrible epoch had as little in his bearing to suggest the temper of the war time as had his old charger who grazed upon the lawn, exempt from all work as one who had done his duty in life and was entitled to ease and comfort as his reward.