Grand as was their heroism, noble as were their deeds, the Union soldiers have little patience with the rhetoric of war-boasters which have caused nearly as much suffering throughout the country in recent years as the melodies of "After the Ball is Over," or "Over the Garden Wall." Some of this rhetoric is over-ripe, like the new school of fiction, in other cases it pumps beautiful incidents from a deep capacious imagination, painfully void of veracity. But at any rate no untoward vauntings proceed from this unconsidered trifle of that epoch, neglected proletariat of tabernacles belligerent, the fleered and flouted Shelter Tent.
To historians with the lenses of judgment in correct focus, its functions in the splendid totality of achievement were by no means unimportant, although hitherto almost wholly unacknowledged. A war-scarred relic of it now, even if covering Carlyle's "most shriveled, wind-dried, dyspeptic, chill-shivering individual, a professor of life-weariness" (a tramp), would be more thrilling to the eye and heart of patriotism than a dozen shining granite monuments raised to commemorate forgiven but unforgetable rebellion. This is the reason for these tears.
Tattered and blackened but serviceable still, type of much else whereon we might perhaps with gain philosophize, the humble but priceless Shelter Tent was borne to the rendezvous by glad warriors returning in triumph, and legally mustered out. The war was ended; its work was done. No further seek its usufruct to discern. Its career was as tame as a typewritten love-letter. The receipt of a depot quartermaster was its sole and all-sufficient obituary.
Vanished from the receding perspective of our experience is the Shelter Tent—vanished from sight, but precious in memory forever. With it went the golden age of the republic; with it went our comradeship of trial and danger. After it came the new heaven and new earth to our redeemed, regenerated country. It has gone. And already, for more than half the soldiery of the grand army of the Union, it has been replaced by that low, green canopy whose curtain never outward swings.
[DRESS PARADE]
IV
ANY scheme of war which omits the stately ceremonial of Dress Parade from among its essential elements is scandalously unsymmetric. The military science is of pre-classical antiquity, its roots shattering the sarcophagi of Cadmus, and Darius, and Ptolemy, and Tubal Cain—penetrating even the caves of the troglodyte and the gravel-beds of the trilobite and the saurians. Ripening ages have at last disclosed the imperative demand of a frequent assembly and orderly arrangement of troops for show and inspection just as the evolution of a parson requires the cultivation of orthography, etymology, surplice and orthodoxy.