"Why, I thought you were!" said Smith. "The papers had you up to seven hundred some time ago, and with all your big posters and advertisements and the large bounties offered, you ought to be bringing them in very rapidly."
"Yes, I suppose so!" answered Woodruff. "We ought to do a good many things in this world, that we do not find it convenient to do. We ought to have been full, and off to Washington, a month ago, and would have been, if there had been any management."
"Why you speak as if you were discouraged and dissatisfied," said Brown, "and not at all as you talked to us when in the city a few days ago."
"No, probably not," answered the Lieutenant. "Well, the fact is, boys, that I have been lying to you like—(and here he used a very hard word not necessary to be recorded.) We have all been lying; but to you, at least, I mean to make a clean breast of it. I did not suppose you would come down, and while you kept at a distance I thought we might as well keep up a good reputation. Now that you are here, you have not half an eye if you do not know that 'Camp Lyon' is a humbug, and that there is no discipline or anything else in it that should be here. I am going to get out of it, if I can with any honor."
"What is the matter?" asked Smith, very much disappointed, and very much discouraged at the key which the situation of Camp Lyon seemed to offer to the corresponding situation of many others of the crack recruiting stations depended upon for filling up the reduced ranks of the army.
"What is the matter? Everything!" said Woodruff, fairly launched out in an exposure of the abuses of the recruiting service, for which he had not before had a fair and safe opportunity. "Half the men are good for nothing, and almost all the officers worse. We could get along with worthless men, and perhaps make soldiers of them, if we only had officers worth their salt. Field or line, there is not one in three that knows when a 'shoulder-arms' is correctly made; and there is no more attempt at either study or practice than there would be if we were a hunting party encamped in the Northern woods. Commissions have been issued to anybody supposed to possess some political influence; and subordinate commissions have been promised by the higher officers to any one who offered to bring in a certain number of rapscallions or pay down a certain sum of money. Those who are not drunken, are lazy; and the men know about as much of wholesome discipline as a hog knows of holy-water. I have tried to do a little better with some of the squads of my own company; but I think that complaints have been made that I 'overworked' the men, and I have fallen into decidedly bad odor with the good people up at the big house yonder."
"And who are they?" asked Brown, wofully ignorant of the details of recruiting in 1862. "And what are they doing up at the 'big house,' as you call it?"
"Eh? you haven't been in there, have you?" said Woodruff. "Come along then, and see. Of course you know that I must refer to our gallant Colonel and the other leading officers at the head of the regiment; and of course you are not so green as not to know that the big house beyond the railroad track, there, is a tavern. Come along and let us see what Colonel Crawford and the rest of them happen to be doing; and by the time that is over we shall have our 'evening parade,' which you must certainly see before you go home."
Escorted by the Lieutenant, the two citizens took their way to the "big house"—a hotel standing on the north side of the railroad track and very near it—a wooden building of two stories, with a piazza in front and at the east end, and flanked by a row of horse-sheds indicating that there was some dependence made upon the patronage of fast drivers stopping there on race days or when trotting was peculiarly good on the pike or the plank. Before the house paced two sentries, with muskets at the shoulder, though what they were guarding was not so clear, as every one passed who wished to do so, whether in uniform or citizen's dress. Behind the corner of the piazza, eastward, an officer was leaning back in his chair against the clap-boards, with his hat over his eyes and apparently asleep; and a few feet from him a sergeant, distinguishable by three dingy stripes on his arm that should have been laid upon his back, was toying, not too decently, with a woman whose looks and manners both proclaimed her one of the "necessary evils" of a modern community.
"Do they allow such actions as that—right here in public, and in the very presence of the officers?" asked Smith, whose education had possibly been a little neglected in some other particulars, as Brown's had been in the details of the military profession.