Dry figs and wormy raisins, savory as the juice of hard tack or tent-pin syrup.
Anonymous liquid perdition in sneaking disguises, which, judged by its taste, was a cheap grade of spiritus strychniti, but judged by its price was molten pearl diluted with dissolved diamond.
Sundries, etc., etc.
Supposed necessaries of luxurious military existence some of these, more or less urgent even when subsisting on the enemy. In that case the conversion by assimilation of Confederate provender into Yankee bone and sinew was a delicious, romantic, patriotic, praiseworthy function. The patriots rather enjoyed this process, but they welcomed assistance from the foregoing catalogue.
Many articles were purchasable only in those post-pay-day periods when the center of financial gravity had been shifted by the exigencies of chuck-a-luck and old sledge from many pockets to one. It is an eminently usable list, resources permitting. Few of the impracticable inutilities of dollar stores or charity bazaars lift here their suspected forms, requiring us to exhaust all statutory and common-law remedies against conspiracy to do great bodily harm. Few of the frabbles are seen which adorn and dignify the dress-suit breakfast given by smirking domestic snobs to a titled foreign fraud, unintelligible as a Blavatsky theosophist. Yet even these, to the insatiate askers of the bivouc, would never quite suffice. Do what he could, the Sutler was ever fated to get himself disliked. A boy is a series of accidents at best. Some of the recruits in their haste to enlist forgot to provide themselves with a girl to leave behind. Those persons, unnerved by the bewildering entanglements of Hardee's tactics, and with no restorative compensations, were never satisfied. They were iron-jawed steam-talkers of calamity, perpetually assailing the walls of rebellion with huge explosions of wrath, and the flaps of the Sutler's tent with the roar of their grumbling. Deafening was their clamor for some absent staple to which distance lent the deceptive enchantment of a dining-car menu; deep their dismay that it was not held perennially on tap. Providence, assisted by timely hints from the wagon master, sometimes brought the supply trains within speaking distance by flag signal. But no discoverable influence ever succeeded in keeping a Sutler's stock up to high-water mark of gustatory demand. And all was in the ultimate cooked down to dire alternative of buy (or steal) and have, or do without and gnaw a file and swear.
As a rule the radiant and responsive Sutler embarked on his voyage militant with more or less capital and credit to back up the spirit of acquisitiveness which possessed him with all its quenchless inflammation. They were either his own, or that of the silent partner who procured his appointment, mayhap a modest and mouse-colored statesman from the remote suburbs, but whose identity was a secret between himself and high heaven. Both capital and credit were prone to evanescence equal to that of the pungent delicacy called quinine, sole sworn antidote to innumerable gastric plagues. They oozed as oozed insurgent hopes when Vicksburg fell, and the Confederacy, like the vail of Solomon's temple, was rent in twain. A balance sheet after one year's multiplication of tribulation, if the victim managed to survive that long, would usually disclose, on the one side, liabilities to the full extent of capital plus credit as aforesaid, the latter perhaps pitted with very large small-pox scars. On the other side was an array of dubious assets, embracing chiefly a tattered tent, a shattered wagon and a battered team, five hundred pounds of scorned sundries, sour and fusty, together with a fat ledger-full of "charges" against the killed, wounded and missing, who by a mysterious fatality had been his largest if not his only patrons. Hence this vexation that made him say things innocent youth should not be permitted to hear. Hence those tears, scalding even the nickel-steel armor of his cheeks. Therefore those sobs, soulful as if wrung from the viscera of a sixteen-dollar melodeon. Who hath hoarseness of voice? The tearful penitent afflicted with mouth-gout and knee-failure on the morning after a debauch; he speaks in muffled tones suggestive of a chastening headache. Who hath redness of eyes? Surely he that tarryeth long over a Sutler's trial balance, consecrated to the apotheosis of infinitesimals.
The Sutler was subject to a military discipline varying from the fierce precision of a Springfield rifle to the grotesque, picturesque and variegated eccentricities of an Austrian musket. He ranked a trifle lower than a mule, but a fraction higher than a corporal. In that principally, if mislaid or lost in action, he did not need to be officially accounted for in the returns like a mule, and would have slightly better prospects than a corporal of posthumous mutilation as to cognomen in the telegrams. The law recognized him and orders shielded him. That was theory. The veterans jeered at him as at the inexpressibly uncouth antics of the drafted raw disciple; everybody kicked and cursed and plundered him. That was practice. The difference was palpable as a headlight scarfpin; startling as the butcher's bill after a charge on repeating rifle pits; significant as the evolution of a human female form divine from cowskin frock and burlap leggins of semi-savagery to high-shouldered polka-dot robings of advanced civilization—further exalted with a laudable ambition to improve the breed of pug puppies.
The Sutler had no status on parade, review or inspection. In the small tinkle and smear of preparatory smatter which preluded these symbolic mummeries, grewsome as tableaux of Chicago option matrimony (three years with the privilege of five), he was totally ignored. He was out of date like the hot biscuit of our ancestors with its yellow saleratus pungency—an auriferous bichloride of alkali. He was forgotten; full satisfaction guaranteed. When the long wavy or waveless tangent of bayonets, rustless or rusty as the case might be, stood forth aligned by a tempestuous adjutant with gestures mysterious and masonic, the unobtrusive Sutler, clothed in clouds of invisibility, affronted no tenderness of occult proprieties by any tangible revelation. He was out of sight, like the costumes of Tyrolean peasantry, variegated with macaroni braidings. He was absent, conferring perhaps with some ragged Haggard from Coxeyville; terms private and no questions asked. When ambidextrous battalions broke by right of companies to the rear into column, and, emulating the conscious mastery of a Sampson hiving his mellifluous swarm in the lion's lordly breast, swept past the statuesque chief of review with resistless swing and strides invincible, he marched not! He sat in seclusion like the stage manager of a bicycle tournament; he rested in abeyance, scorched with scorn and broiling on hot epithets, in the stratified attitude of a listener trying to hear himself cogitate; he waited patiently, vibrating from gay to grave, from saucy to sincere; he lingered; no presents, no flowers. When the reckless inspector snapped hammers and jingled rammers and squinted inquisitively into muskets' murderous mouths, our friend the Sutler, profoundly versed in the preciousness of cautiousness, was nowhere seen. There was no hayseed in his brain; there were no flies on his intellect. With just enough body, perhaps, to serve as pretext for a soul to stay on earth, his great head was crowded from pit to dome with prudence. He had read of premature explosions and was satisfied; he had no wish to be wounded by an accidental discharge of his duty; to him eyesight was a poem and each finger a benediction; he was brave to recklessness, but even his minor members were precious; he blew into no muzzles, for safety is sweeter than fame; children half price.
The most startling of all war reminiscences perhaps was that revealed in far northern Michigan more than twenty years after Lee's surrender. A party of skaters built huge bonfires on thick ice and finally thawed out an imprisoned echo of bellum days, which cried impressively with the broad, plaintive, querulous, rebel accent of long ago: "All we want is to be let alone!" This current Confederate shibboleth expressed the luminous Sutler's abiding desire. Even when brass music stormed the camp as with whiffs of canister and grape, deluging all ears in torrents of harmonious discord, he failed to materialize. Suspicious of invidious comparison with the bluff drum major's majestic gorgeousness, he relieved the strain by withdrawing the infectious pestilence of his overshadowing personality. He vanished like a beautiful dream; relatives might call and learn something to their advantage. There were different opinions as to his whereabouts—but then it is difference of opinion that supports pool rooms as well as church choirs. Concord and discord were alike unheeded. The drum's glum rumble; the mighty trombone's round, reechoed roar; the feeble fierceness of cracked clarionet; the hissing tortures of the tormented horn tuned to the shrieks of lacerated souls; the witchbroth symphony from eye of newt and nose of frog and bar of gospel hymn that drips in blistering spirals out of tone-shattering fifes; the ghastly ground-swell's undertone that floats this fumid wreckage of assassinated sound upon its bleeding bosom—all these and other aggravated vibratory horrors searched for him vainly in the nooks and corners of a disgusted atmosphere. He was gone; front seats reserved for friends of the family.