The Mules are not supposed to have understood the war, and consequently can not be expected to hold themselves responsible for its results. But the man of distorted perspective, who measures the circumference of the universe by the diameter of his own egotism, shrinks from no exaltation and shirks no responsibility. He is festooned with self-complacency, wearing always a fourteenth century smile of content.
Controversy is welcome to him, as the advent of a bloomer woman to a social purity club. He relishes argument and he loves to boast. He can readily maintain that his side was eternally right and the other side infernally wrong in the war, for that fact is beginning to be somewhat widely accepted. To establish his own feats is somewhat more difficult, whether he sing like Miriam or howl like Jeremiah in narrating them. But he will cheerfully spend a week in marching one of his deeds past a given point, and skeptics soon discover that it is cheaper to feed him than to fight him. He may be an ex-major-general, or possibly an ex-teamster. Sometimes he is an ex-corporal, mellow as those autumnal days when the golden glory of the sassafras vies with the persimmon's gaudy crimson. Oftenest perhaps he is an ex-captain, for does not every war evolve the greatest captain of the age as its ultimate hero? He may now pass for a respectable citizen, with houses to let and money to burn, who rashly trusts to his imagination when his memory is out of focus, and lets the bloody chasm go on yawning for more gore.
More likely, however, he carries his real estate as well as his religion in his wife's name, fully persuaded that a rolling stone gathers no moss but grinds exceeding fine, razors and tomahawks included. In any event he is a mighty talker before the crowd, bristling with home thrusts that give out a sizzling sound and an odor of roast owl. He is a Chimborazo of noise with an ant-hill of achievement to back it; a miracle of linked hallucinations ludicrously elongated; an extinct incandescent carbon belching black smoke. His sole claim to mention in connection with the useful, unpretentious Mule, is the purely accidental circumstance of their simultaneous military service. He has no other title to consideration in this important historical episode.
He is not a typical old soldier, and must not be so classified. He is an exception. When tests are to be applied he can always prove an alibi. His mouth was put on soft and spread; the flush on his nose was acquired at a great expenditure of time and money. He comes to the front in his community, sage of the flannel lip and velvet eye, in accordance with a known law that not always the ablest men are heard, but always the ablest to be heard. He comes to the front with the persistence of a pardoned anarchist, and the flawless joy of a yearling who has maxed in math.
Meantime it is one of the everlasting verities that in hands of men "entirely" great, the calligraph is mightier than the bludgeon. Shall calligraphs stand dumb and the story of days when God shook the nation until her lakes foamed over their pebbly shores and her rivers gurgled with bloody ebullition remain unwrit, in fear of probing blow-holes in the record of some grand snark in the concatenated order of hoo hoos? Shall posterity be given over to moral mushiness, lest some village Goliath of Gath, prone to such nightly exhilaration of spirits as ends in losing the combination of adjacent streets, get shrunken into shreds of paper-rag, brain-web and vapor?
Historians of the war have minutely narrated its grand events—events which rising generations are already reproaching themselves for coming too late to engage in, being relegated to their own nerveless annals penciled on the segment of a film. Most classes of participants in these events have been heard from. Either in plain narrative or wrathful controversy they have ventured an enormous consumption of time and eternity. Whether their anger be a dynamite shell or a soap-bubble, its vocalization is uniformly terrific. The generals and the majors; the teamsters and the staff; even the drafted men and substitutes, unstable as the heroine who vowed at first that she would never consent, and then relented—all these have spoken or can speak for themselves. Majestically muscled around the mouth, staunchly nerved in the cheek, they need no rhetorical proxy. Since history has accepted most of their averments, they modestly consider themselves endorsed.
There are other classes of participants who must be spoken for—their merits have not yet become the theme of tropical, topical songs. The speechless toilers of the conflict, half horse, half devil, half donkey, stand high on the list of those who should not be forgotten. We may fling flash-lights of inspection all around the black horizon of war and find no greater faithfulness, not even in Israel.
Under the cadence of march, murmur of camp, clangor of battle and reverberating pæans of victory, rumbles the ground tone of all war's harmonies, the deep contra basso of a melodious bray, reminding us that justice remains yet to be done to the instrument which made campaigns successful and battles possible. It is an instrument to which due credit has never been given, yet which is infinitely more credit-worthy than many of the boasters, "ablest to be heard," who make the cackle of their villages noxious to mankind.
That instrument is the Army Mule! Let him who hath ears to hear lend them now to a belated attempt at vindication. Let the man of prejudice disinfect his mind and listen. It is naught, saith the buyer, then goeth his way and boasteth; but an ad valorem tax on dudes has never been made to yield any revenue.
The name of the original inventor of the Mule is lost in the immemorial mists. Although, as hereinbefore intimated, his longevity is a chestnut as old as the Morse alphabet, or older, his nativity is still a conundrum. No Mule's teeth, with or without gold filling, glisten among shells of the pliocene period. No Mule elevates his afterdeck in the granitic formations. None of his petrified footprints are discernible in those anteglacial basins where Afric's sunny fountains now sprinkle her shirtless swarms. Hence, although he possibly antedates all living apostles of lady suffrage, he is presumably not a pre-Adamite. Perhaps his first discoverer was "that Anah" who, to his astonishment, "found Mules in the wilderness," where donkeys had been browsing, etc. See Genesis xxxvi, 24. It is not permissible to go behind the returns. What we know is that he was introduced to the American people by anticipation, that is to say, through his paternal ancestor, by G. Washington, Esq., of Mount Vernon in Virginia.