It was prescribed and issued. The average visitor to Washington is welcomed to his nation's proud capital with loud acclaim by the hack fiend and the hotel runner, both Afro-American. The Shelter Tent was welcomed with corresponding warmth, as aforesaid, when its utility began to materialize. Out into the pink and pearl of morning sunshine, or into a sour, dreary, morning drizzle, step from it the tentmates of a night's camp. They were proud as the Jerseyman who boasts his descent "from the family of Smith-Smiths, connected by a syphon." They were free from the proverbial weary, next-morning-condition of civil life, for sleep profound had knitted up the raveled stocking heel of care. Each carried a moiety of homestead folded in the knapsack strapped to his stalwart form, and stepped out with a sublime song of triumph on his lips and in his heart. Each carried his own house. He also laughed at his own jokes with a loud tenor tone. Marvel of more than this marvelous facility of home-shifting was our inimitable volunteer. He bore constantly also his year's wardrobe and his week's provender, toothsome (though less tender) as planked whitefish from the cold and classic Assiniboin. Likewise, his drink, his tools tonsorial, manicurial and dentifric, such as fate vouchsafed and regulations permitted. In addition he bore his bed, his financial capital and surplus, his arsenal of projectiles, his weapons of offense, his instruments of torture, and his implements of toil. Strength considered, no pack-horse carried a weightier lading, and yet the soldier was denied the dull, dumb creature's exemption from rational accountability.
Thus freighted with belligerent melange the mobilized veteran marches all day, with his thinking bayonet at his side, his logical musket on his shoulder, and his profane vocabulary held in measurable subjection, the nominative agreeing with the verb occasionally by accident.
On through hot and bitter limestone dust that blanches all his cuticle, then reddens eyes and nose and mouth with unsanctified inflammation. On through floundering quagmires of yellow mud that settles into slush, then slumps into slime; vivid parallel to the moral collapse of a white-souled commissary warmed by beams of opportunity and trodden by hoofs of temptation.
On through heat excruciating or cold unendurable; through rain, sleet, hail,—storm's dread alternations of discomfort,—all the lengthening day, his trousers shrinking to knee-pants as he trudges along. On, footsore and halting, each nerve a roadway for pain's burning steps, each bone racked with rheumatic twinges, until night brings the limping turnpike tourist to a welcome resting-place.
The bivouac then, and full-orbed glory of the Shelter Tent! Matchless for adaptation, it is pitched as soon as ranks are broken. The landscape whitens with swift magic like a Monday's clothes-line billowy with confidential raiment. The tentmates join the sundered segments, and with sticks or stalks or poles, or, lacking these, with bayonet and gun and ramrod, lift the flexile sheet to the required angle, and lo! their dwelling stands confessed; no spectacular monstrosity, but compact, cleanly and stylish as a salad dressed in oil.
Hasty, most hasty, also of formalities and frills devoid, the varied events which thereupon eventuate. The search for wood and water, energetic as the pace of reckless engineer, who goes by the meeting point at a mile and a half a minute calling for more steam. The ablutions, rich in doleful reminiscence of rare and radiant days at home when the brow was wiped with cabbage leaves or cotton waste; vivid with memories of the printing-house towel that hangs by the door.
The cooking simple and savory; the cook with a look of far-away Georgia in his face, across whose peaceful breast salt waves of trouble roll, but from whose humble lips no back-talk comes. The mastication, almost as irritating as classical music, save as spiced with time-honored facetiæ wrested from some wrecked parthenon; long-distance jokes that would bore easily through an inch plank and kill at random.
Drinking straight and plain from the flat but priceless old canteen, out of whose limpid depths, with a gurgling capacity of one miner's inch per second, are drawn exhaustless liquid refreshments that shame the isles of Greece, the hills of Spain, the purple heaven of Rome,—in dreams thou livest on! Above all, post-prandial exercise of dry dishwashery with a chip, exuding bicarbonate of turnpike dust; one touch of water makes the whole camp grin.
Then comes, with briefest interlude for rest, or recreation, or knocking out spot after spot of the decalogue on the sly, swift preparation for the few, short hours of nocturnal repose; profound as a policeman with clews to a stabbing mystery; dreamless as some cold-sliced fragment of the long ago, sitting passionless through chasing, racing ages. Tentmates are nervous with the fatigues of march and nettlesome as bibulous companions in civil life, who quarrel about trifles slight as hair; then settle their quarrels over a round of the rosy; and finally quarrel afresh as to who shall liquidate for the liquor.