The Army Mule, and Other War Sketches

by Henry A. Castle

Of the man masculine was our Sutler. Not a woman. Neither a dude. No gallon of gall in a plaid suit, owed for, could have endured, for one short seething, scorching month, these multiplex ordeals of catastrophe. At the current quadrennial round-up of aspirants, when the internal revenue bung-smeller parades his political scars, the dude is sometimes seen—in the Sutler's tent never. He would have suffered all the agonies of a bullock threatened with corn-cob strangulation, and no compensatory convictions. It were better to be staked out in the legislative vestibule as custodian of cuspidors. We have been generous in extending the elective franchise to naturalized citizens and all who declare their intention to become such—probably too generous. We have encouraged foreign nations to work off their damaged and unsalable goods on us, in the immigrant line, as in other lines. But we have never been cruel. We have pitied the sorrows of our rich young man. We have certainly never been cruel enough to expose our helpless, inferior fellow-creatures, those curled darlings of dandydom, to vicissitudes like that of the Sutlership. That were an infamy fit to make the green goods gouge and the gold brick trick eminently respectable by comparison. Dudes have their function. So have train-boys and other calamities. So have rose sherbet and chewing gum; so have lambrequins and doilies. But not in war time. Neither they nor any other gin-fizz effervescence of intangible ephemera. Their fate in such surroundings would be sad as that of the tough but meritorious army mule, who survived all war's perils, and thirty years later shattered his hind leg, from hoof to hip, on the chin of a traveling highwines apostle from Louisville. There was absolutely no place for the dude in our army life. The velvet of his voice would speedily roughen. One week of hard bread would ruin his teeth; one day's rasp of the wind would utterly devastate his complexion. The rural visitor who begins his city experiences by being piloted to a bunco bank, and ends them by being piloted to a pawn-shop, would encounter no more swift, inglorious career. The horrors of the zero season are intensified when the man with a cold in his head insists on discussing financial issues with us at every turn. The inconveniences of army life were pronounced enough, as it was, without the further infliction of the dreadful dude, in Sutler's trains or elsewhere. Nay, verily! This small erratum of nature, this insectiverous insignificance, had no place or function there. Heredity endowed him with an intellect requiring a three months' vacation four times a year, and fate left him to the full enjoyment thereof. Fortunately for the credit of this nation the rebellion was efficiently and sufficiently suppressed without his infinitesimal assistance.

It is a sad and significant fact that the navy had no Sutlers. The sailors and marines missed the picturesque inspiration of his ministering service; the exuberant and perennial freshness of his presence; the sounding brass of his tickling symbols. Our surviving web-footed compatriots modestly demand that due recognition be accorded their important branch of the belligerent forces. In making and enforcing claims to our attention, their honest clamor fills the sea-coast air, from Greenland's icy icebergs to Charleston's shifting sands. And they have right. Did not each base of our supplies rest on a waterway patrolled by gunboats? Were not all our armies named from streams along which their fraternal tin-clads trolleyed and thundered? Was not brave Jack always ready, manning the yards, when we fell back for reinforcements, and the like, to receive us with three cheers and a Dartmouth yell? Did not the Monitor, that grand old frigate, without a sail, a mast, a rope, a stem, a stern, a yardarm or a bowsprit, steam straight into the core of our hearts, and ram her chilled steel nostrils far and away into the realms of historic muse?

The naval veteran of to-day, working his chin industriously to keep his teeth tight and vigorously dodging as best he may the wiles of the world, the flesh and the politicians, complains at times that scant allusion crops out in war reunions to episodes wherein he figures lustrously. Here let full justice be freely done. For Farragut and Foote and Porter, for Dupont, Dahlgren, and a hundred more, and all their thousands of devoted, daring shipmates, let honors thicken with the passing years, and glories brighten as the centuries roll on! The same glad impulse burned within their breasts; the same great triumphs gilded their endeavor. Their manners and methods differed widely from ours, but in aim and motive we are one. It is their good fortune never to have known how much they lost in having not the solace of the Sutler. It was not their fault.

The young recruit, christened Zephaniah, was not responsible therefor, because he experienced his origin at a period when he was powerless to direct results. If good people would only learn to vote as they pray, it might possibly be different. But let even a marine run up against a brace game in Dead Man's Gulch, and permanent enlightenment is liable to eventuate. And when the atmosphere of our homes grows mephitic with the odor of satanic journalism, we may perhaps awaken to the danger of cultivating depravities that are calculated to stimulate a boom in the brimstone market.

Connecticut produced a learned pig which could read; New York, not to be outdone, exhibits some educated donkeys that can write, that can even edit newspapers, have done it, have been caught in the very act, and, alas, seem inclined to boast of it. When such things can be, and overcome us like a summer sunshade, why marvel that the navy had no Sutler? If a shattered and battered son of the sea comes forward now and then to bask in the glow of that comradeship we so fondly cherish, let us bid him jolly welcome. In that long period which elapsed between the dates when President Jefferson Davis was captured in confidential costume and President Grover Cleveland escaped from the congressional trocha, our people were steadily but very slowly growing to an appreciation of their numerous blessings. During this period many a stranded ex-sailor found himself filled with the vague unrest of a rural legislator who for the first time carries a railroad pass in his pocket. The yearning for travel was irresistable. He has thus projected himself into the sphere of our observation as far inland as Indianapolis or Omaha. If we have not seized the opportunity to thank him for Hampton Roads, and Mobile Bay, and Fort Saint Phillip and Pittsburg Landing and Fort Fisher, for New Orleans and Pensacola and Galveston, we have ignored a binding obligation and neglected a golden opportunity. Let us ignore, neglect no longer.

We yield him full measure of credit. We regret more than words can express that he never enjoyed the felicity of having a Sutler. If one were accessible he should be introduced to him, even now!

The impression which seems to be somewhat currently prevalent, in circles usually well informed on financial topics, that many of the largest fortunes of our present era were founded on the war-profits of army Sutlers, is manifestly erroneous. It is at all times easier to get poor in a minute than rich in a month, according to one of the wise saws of the transcendental orientals. The wealthy widow who has wasted her substance in riotous trolley parties can verify it. Fortunes have originated in the profits of army contracts, judiciously invested in well-slanted real estate at Pittsburg or Cincinnati. Their inheritors have perhaps reached congress where they speak speeches prescribed for them by a scrivener. Upon the condemned horses of the thrifty quartermaster, or sunken cargoes of costly oats duly accounted for by economical commissaries, mysteriously materializing later in tangible cash, large estates have been based. They were mostly dissipated thereafter by extensive land-purchases in remote regions notable chiefly for a particularly brazen sky and a specially mean annual temperature, where the prairie dog yelps to his or her mate as the case may be, sole disturbers of all the dismal silence in nature's vast immensity.

Even the sumptuous pay of the pampered and envied private soldiers, the magnificent stipend of thirteen dollars a month equal to an average of at least six dollars in the precious gold of that period, was sometimes duly hoarded at compound interest. This, with occasional mining stock speculations on the side, may have rolled up in the course of a generation to that standard of affluence which glitters with hope of dowry to dudes or alimony to divorce lawyers. Believe it ye who can; assert it ye who dare. It would not be incredible. The first kiss, alas! often leads to more.

Balder fictions have found credence at the chrysanthemum club, where the lack luster eye of the effete plunger gazes into the gurgling optic of the breadstuff debauchee, and where harvesting a royal flush is the leading industry. Wilder improbabilities were widely swallowed before the Russian Israelites landed on our coast and introduced their rich nut-brown flavor to the ward caucus, together with the corrugated spirituality of a bethel-vocalist and the vulcanized nerve of a Tammany leader. Statements like those might pass current in village drug stores, where streams of limpid, scented crystal burst forth from marbleized iron fountains at five cents per burst. Rumors equally incredible have floated around unchallenged at recherché receptions given by Mrs. Olof Swenson, of the James River Valley, S. D., to the local colonial dames. Notwithstanding all this, such allegations as these, with due, determined effort, might be made to harmonize with possibility like a red cart with a sorrel mule.

But no properly fertilized intellect can ever germinate a supposition that the rudiments of even one contemporaneous million were laid in the career of a Sutler. A hundred shillings invested in trade will give a man meat and wine; in acres it will give him cabbage and salt, wrote another astute Arabian—or mayhap the same. But the Sutler trade is a valid and visible exception, verified by experience, costly as an Indian outbreak and conclusive as the rebound of a London free-trade banquet in the wilds of West Virginia.