The Army Mule, and Other War Sketches

by Henry A. Castle

Of seven presidents elected since the close of the war, six were ex-soldiers. Minnesota points with pride to her nine soldier governors. The Veterans quietly gathered in the voluntary and involuntary honors of their admiring countrymen, while the chief function of their traducers seems to have been to crop thistles, grow ears and bray.

The surviving Veterans of the Union army were neither drones in the busy hive of national development, nor a burden on the benevolence of their fellow-citizens. Ninety-five per cent. of them made a success in the civil battles of life—doing men's part honorably, industriously, heroically in the work of the world. Only five per cent. were failures, less than three per cent. ever became wholly dependent on public charity for support.

The veterans quietly gathered in the voluntary and involuntary honors.... One state points with pride to her nine soldier governors, and of seven presidents elected since the close of the war, six were ex-soldiers (Page [230])

An appalling phalanx of apparitions at times menaced the peace of nervous taxpayers over prospective drafts on their plethoric resources. A cat may kick at a king. Men gifted with wind and lungs, men with well-shaved voice and neatly-modulated nose, have proclaimed a shuddering dread of future difficulty in preparing for wholesale care of the thriftless ex-soldier. But those unsophisticated suspects went on ruthlessly, recklessly, paying their own full share of the taxes and manifestly bent on relentlessly taking care of themselves. The identical persons who in the honey-dew days of the "Boys in Blue" had gaily floated in geysers of taffy, constantly sprayed with cascades of gush, were, ten years later, the objects of fathomless solicitude on the part of contemporaries who feared that universal pauperism would engulf them. Vain was the dread; bootless the solicitude. In the aggregate, the discharged Veterans contributed in taxes more than the sum total of their army pay, and by their own productive labor added more to the wealth of the nation than the entire cost of the war. And at any time within the last thirty years there might have been found in all our prisons a larger per capita proportion of former church dignitaries and bank officers than of honorably discharged soldiers of the Union. The typical Veteran was neither a tramp nor a bummer. He was a thrifty, self-respecting, patriotic citizen. At the plow, the anvil, the lathe; on the engine, the mail car, the ship; in the lumbering camp, the harvest field, the counting-room, the factory; at the bar, on the bench, in the pulpit—everywhere in spheres of useful, successful effort, he wrought faithfully, ardently, triumphantly.

Even where the Veterans never went, their influence penetrated and vivified and fructified. Their aromatic, anæsthetic codfish, their mackerel stuffed with savor and salinity, have carried freedom's tidings to Borneo's wilds. A Grand Army post annually observes memorial day in distant Honolulu. Ireland and Poland, lanced spots of a huge European suppuration, have felt the pulsations of our victory. And on the dim frontiers of far-off Argentina, sweet girl graduates of Minnesota's normal schools, daughters of Veterans, turbaned with haloes and aproned with the flag, are unfolding the mysteries of orthography, chirography, cube roots, and syllogisms, to rejoicing grandchildren of authentic Patagonian cannibals. Whether as a Daniel come to judgment or a Jonah come to grief, the "Gallant Veteran" adorned his era—an era that is past.

The third decade brought peculiar revelations and some characteristic iconoclasms, wrought by the most gothic of vandals known to human kind. The deeds of the Boy in Blue and the Gallant Veteran have been told and retold in verses so musical that they might almost be punched with holes and performed on self-playing pianos, automatically, as it were. But the terms are obsolete, and the current period has brought its special designation, tremulous as a phrase from De Senectute, and redolent of lean and slippered Pantaloon—"The Old Soldier." It came in the days when colored cartoons were growing on the country like a bad habit, and it came to stay. Whether applied in honor and tenderness, or in derision and mockery, who can tell?

This epithet tells a truth, though perhaps emanating from indecent exposure of intellect in a brain whose convolutions are more crooked than the ram's horn that triturated the defenses of Jericho. It tells a truth, though more cruel than that sweeping massacre when the patriarch Cain came within one of slaying all the youth in Asia, or than the edict which collared and cuffed a dilapidated Coxey in the shadow of the capitol's proud dome.

Whether we like it or not, it has elements of permanence,—that euphony which is the kernel of fact; that levity which is the soul of wit; that pointedness which is the test of endurance. It has manifestly come to abide. When the lady lacteal artist lactealizes the sober, circumspect cow, the product is harmless as the process and participants; no spirituous or vinous venom from that nourishing fountain e'er exudes. When the lion eats a lamb the lamb becomes lion; when the lamb eats a lion the results can be better imagined than depicted. When the commonweal tourist falls aweary, he wins consolation from a rehearsal of "Bunion's Pilgrim's Progress, or the Trials of a Trail," and rises refreshed.

When the ex-soldier feels rheumatic twinges clutching at his nerves like an eagle's beak, resistance were vain as kicking at a thunderbolt in crocheted slippers. He is still vigorous, considering all that he has gone through—and all that has gone through him! But he is not invulnerable; some of his elasticity is as deceptive as the hospitality of an alleged park dotted all over with warnings to keep off the grass. He may profitably display that charity which covers a multitude of sarcasms, and serenely accept the inevitable as a companion piece to tariff reduction, civil-service reform, lectures on advanced domesticity by the emancipated female whose family lives on canned goods, and other copyrighted jokes. Yes; the Boys in Blue have donned the Gray. They are no longer young; they will never be younger; they are "Old Soldiers" now, and will be to the end.