The problem as to who put down the rebellion, hitherto more recondite than that of the precession of the equinoxes or of the invention of the kindergarten, and infinitely provocative of type-written rhetoric, has at last been solved! It was the boy in blue, his mother, and the girl he left behind him. Only the first had or could have the right to vote; the others had the higher right to be excused from voting. But all were in the conflict, and each furnished a demonstrable quota of heroic endeavor which crystallized into grand achievement. The first did the fighting; the second did the praying; the third supplied the inspiration.
The first effort of a regiment at observance of the tactical symposium termed Dress Parade marked an era in its annals which was always thereafter recurred to with prickling sensations at the roots of the hair and a revolving propensity in the pit of the stomach. How it was ever accomplished, endured, and survived was a mystery fathomless as the craft of a Christianized and deodorized savage.
The component parts of this approaching cosmorama may, with profit, be inspected separately.
The enlisted recruit, only a fortnight removed from the fresh milk and feather beds of home, is already jaundice-smitten, until the white of his eye shows quite golden-roddish and sun-flowery. In his aspect we discern the wisdom of one who is seventeen years old for the first time, and duly appreciates the fact. In his liver, quinine is already wrestling with calomel for the supremacy, even as in his soul remembered moral precepts are already summoned to mount guard against the wiles of sin. He is sugared o'er with the pale cast of virtue—stern in his rectitude as the senator who has never betrayed a trust. His black eyes duly sparkle in æsthetic harmony with his curly, coaly hair, as he warbles new-fledged patriotic melodies with fervid sincerity. And he views the imminence of experience in human carnage with the blind insouciance of a political party that is being led through a slaughter-house to an open grave.
If by inscrutable preordination the chevrons of a corporal or sergeant decorate his flapping sleeves, the agonies of his self-consciousness are unutterably intensified. His picturesque, variegated and altogether incomprehensible strut, is positively unique. His awkwardness spreads and sprouts and amplifies and ramifies. To witness his embarrassment is enough to break the heart of an orphan. His tendency to do the right thing at the wrong time and wrong thing at all times may be predicted with the precision of an exact science.
His responsibilities are enormous; his perplexities are terrible; his woes are innumerable; he is dejected, afflicted, tormented. He is helpless as a lawyer hurling maxims of abstract justice ruthlessly in the face of evidence. He is a non-commissioned officer. That is to say: an unquoted quota; an unenumerated numeral; a non-existent existence; not an officer at all!
The lieutenants, with authority varying inversely as the square of their bumptiousness, are loud in their pretensions as the howl of a defeated candidate who has fallen outside his breastworks. Mrs. Solomon in all her several hundred glories was not elaborated like one of these. Invincible Chicago, with the biggest and tallest Masonic temple in the world, by thunder, is not so proud. The triumphant statesman who has evolved a barley schedule that will put the robber barons of western Iowa to open shame, is no more inflated. The congressman who has exposed a rival's political armor-plate, honeycombed with blowholes, is less exultant. State linked to state, in goodly fate, in mart and mint and mine; in rolling plain of golden grain or toss of plumy pine—none of these could fabricate a more colossal national glorification than these imposing subalterns, with ravenous tools of butchery girt on their semi-erect forms, and fiercely fretful lest the rebellion should be suppressed before they could debouch upon the ensanguined scenery.
The captain is big with the fate of empire. He has dwelt upon the agonizing spectacle of his beloved country bleeding at every vein, not to mention the carotid and celluloid arteries, et cetera, until he has accumulated an amount of frenzy which only blood of a highly oxygenized quality and in most generous libations can ever expect to satisfy. The candidate with a separate and distinct set of views on all crucial questions for each county in his district may pass muster on the civil arena, but this centurion is vehemently in earnest. He has supped on a thousand horrors—remember the number.
His eye is one gleaming chrysolite. His lips are pink and luminous, dripping phosphorescent formulas in characterizing the assailants of the flag. His mustache bristles with fury like the rays of an arc lamp shooting pulsations of glow into unresisting darkness. His nose sniffs battles from afar and threatens direful death in each resounding sneeze. His brow is knit into knots of perplexity by chasing tactic combinations which canter at will through the vasty thought-clefts of his gray matter, foreboding a fatty degeneration thereof. His fervid soul thirsts for the hour when he shall lead his eager men to regions where bounteous crops of glory are harvested semi-monthly from valor's fertile fields. No pent up Schenectady contracts his grand ambition. But his torch is illuminative, not strictly conflagrational, after all.