Hence when, if ever, the Sutler shall be monumentalized in imperishable staff, it will be in none of those attitudes spectacular. An attitude of watchfulness, of expectancy, of expostulation, or of despair like one in last stages of the Baconian theory, were nearest truth to nature. The flashing outbreaks of his fiery mind, the sorrows of his overloaded heart, no carven stone or molded bronze can portray to skeptical contemporaries, or transmit to an undeserving, unbelieving posterity.
If the post of danger is the post of real honor, the Sutler has been scandalously overlooked in all awards. His assigned position at the rear during an advance, and in front during a retreat, fatally exposed him to depredations of the mixed society indigenous thereto. Encompassed with perils, a floating Atlantis mislaid in a cannibal archipelago, his only resource was rat-eyed vigilance and brass-breasted audacity. A recital of his exploits in defending the citadel wherein his precious perishables lay would shine with the story of Farragut lashed to a mast, or Hooker bombarding rainbows, a veritable torch-light procession down the dark avenues of history. Painting him in gaudy hues would be as unæsthetic as offering green goggles to a Delsarte club. But a mild touch of eulogy, a harmless ginger-pop effervescence of panegyric, may supposedly be ventured before we throw him on the tender mercies of posterity. Would Sir Patrick's famed toast to the "bloody 69th"—"The last in the field and the first to leave it; equal to none!" pass muster? If so, who will begrudge? None, we defiantly aver, unless it be some surviving marauder, overloaded with bias and twisted with prejudice until his withers are wrung, who once wore a half-shaved head for Sutler-burglary, then trod the brambly path of humiliation out of camp to the tune of "Rogue's March," while sad breezes sighed through rents in his respectability.
What a magnificent army that was, in which we served—one of the grandest in numerical strength, by far the grandest in its intelligence, its achievements and its inspiration, whereof the world holds record.
Ninus of Assyria, 2200 B. C., led against the Bactrians a force of 1,700,000 foot, 200,000 horse, and 16,000 chariots armed with scythes.
Cyrus besieged Babylon with 600,000 foot and 120,000 horse.
Italy, a little before Hannibal's time, was able to send into the field nearly 1,000,000 men. Yet Hannibal, during his campaign in Italy and Spain, plundered 400 towns and destroyed 300,000 people.
When Xerxes arrived at Thermopylæ his force by land and sea aggregated 2,641,610, according to Herodotus, a weighty worthy man, and worth his weight in sesterces.
January 1, 1861, the army of the United States consisted of nineteen regiments of all arms, numbering, present and absent, 16,402 officers and men. From April 1, 1861, to April 28, 1865, a monthly average of 56,000 men, a large army in itself, was recruited, equipped and supplied for the volunteer forces. At the last-named date 1,034,064 volunteers, after four years' casualties of war, were actually in the service. From first to last 2,678,967 men were mustered in, constituting 1,668 regiments of infantry, 232 of cavalry and 52 of artillery—total 1,952 regiments. In three months, from May 7th to August 7th, 1865, a total of 640,806 troops were mustered out of service and restored to the ranks of productive citizenship. The cost of the war to the United States government has been measured in money at $3,963,159,751.15. The states in rebellion aggregated an area of 733,144 square miles, with 12,572 miles of navigable rivers, 2,523 miles of sea coast and 7,031 miles of inland boundary.
With these facts for a basis we may, if courageous, institute comparisons with the great events of history. Courage is essential. A page of fulminating statistics is as dangerous to the unwary as a loaded gun-boat floating with the current, cocked, capped and aimed below the water line. In a village ignorant of the science of the division of labor, one may get his child christened by the same artist who repaired his boots. In certain localities one may revel, so to speak, in the enjoyments of a broad phase of humor, based on fried onions, carbolized tar and commodities of that sort, or of a broad plane of sociability, based on plug tobacco, pint flasks and discussion of dog pedigrees. But in the higher realms of statistics, and other like researches, success depends upon the cultivation of devoted courage, courageous fortitude, and a subtle intellectuality intricate as the distorted diagram on the face of a moss agate.
Fenimore Cooper depicts the army Sutler of the Revolutionary contest as a woman; habitually Irish; rubicund, snuffy, blasphemous and addicted to gin—in brief an object of charity, socially and pecuniarily. She can be fitted out, without violence to probability, with an eye like a cross-section of hard boiled egg, and the shallow retreating brow of an ibex; also with cotton in her ears. Her clothing might easily have been fished out at random from a box of contributions to hailstorm sufferers. Her coquettish, curly locks were doubtless of oakum texture and solferino tinge. This much is conjectural, for when we read on and learn that she was the camp washerwoman we abandon the pursuit forthwith. Like flowers that bloom in the Japanese spring, she has nothing to do with the case. She vanishes like a congressman (before the czar era) constructively absent when a quorum is to be burst. The Sutler of our more refined war period was of the man masculine. No woman could have filled this requisition, even in those days of Brigham Young's multi-wife propaganda. No woman could have fought the good fight and kept the stock in such a crisis, even with her trousseau reduced to a calico basis. Where languorous lilies fill the eye with beauty, let the gentler sex abide. A woman in our Sutler's sphere would have been more useless than the horse that sustains superannuated relations to a fire department. She would have been more expensive than the funeral of a deceased statesman charged to the contingent fund; more dangerous than a damp basement. During twenty centuries, while among men the glorious Roman has degenerated into the monkey-tamer, woman, on the contrary, has greatly advanced. And the advanced woman has apparently come to stay. The ethereal creature who succumbed to tight lacing has vanished. A stronger, sterner class succeed. The manly miss comes forward, and her demands are something sumptuous. Nothing less than the mandarin's full yellow jacket and peacock feather will suffice. But the most fluent champion of uplifted femininity never dared to rise with a whir to claim this dizzy pre-eminence of a Sutlership. The cut of her garments may be virile and chic, still she aspired not so high. The bravest of meat-stall heroines, with slaughter-house eyes and leaf-lard complexion, may declaim suffrage syllogisms with the witchery of a South Missouri angel, and her young man may tear his hair in angry anguish at the thought, but Sutlerships transcend the ambition of both.