This was a decree that one of every ten of the Yankee captives should be shot. There being a hundred of Marshall’s men, one hundred beans—ninety white and ten black—were put in a hat. Then the company was mustered as on dress parade. Whoso drew a white bean was to be held prisoner of war; whoso drew a black bean was to die.
In the early part of the drawing Wake drew a white bean. Toward the close the turn of a neighbor and comrade from Owen county who had left a wife and baby at home was called. He and Wake were standing together, Holman brushed him aside, walked out in his place and drew his bean. It turned out to be a white one. Twice within the half hour death had looked him in the eye and found no blinking there.
I have seen quite a deal of hardihood, endurance, suffering, in both women and men; splendid courage on the field of action; perfect self-possession in the face of danger; but I rather think that Wake Holman’s exploit that day—next to actually dying for a friend, what can be nobler than being willing to die for him?—is the bravest thing I know or have ever been told of mortal man.
Wake Holman went to Cuba in the Lopez Rebellion of 1851, and fought under Pickett at the Battle of Cardenas. In 1855-56 he was in Nicaragua, with Walker. He commanded a Kentucky regiment of cavalry on the Union side in our War of Sections. After the war he lived the life of a hunter and fisher at his home in Kentucky; a cheery, unambitious, big-brained and big-hearted cherub, whom it would not do to “projeck” with, albeit with entire safety you could pick his pocket; the soul of simplicity and amiability.
To have known him was an education in primal manhood. To sit at his hospitable board, with him at the head of the table, was an inspiration in the genius of life and the art of living. One of his familiars started the joke that when Wake drew the second white bean “he got a peep.” He took it kindly; though in my intimacy with him, extending over thirty years, I never heard him refer to any of his adventures as a soldier.
It was not possible that such a man should provide for his old age. He had little forecast. He knew not the value of money. He had humor, affection and courage. I held him in real love and honor. When the Mexican War Pension Act was passed by Congress I took his papers to General Black, the Commissioner of Pensions, and related this story.
“I have promised Gen. Cerro Gordo Williams,” said General Black, referring to the then senior United States Senator from Kentucky, “that his name shall go first on the roll of these Mexican pensioners. But”—and the General looked beamingly in my face, a bit tearful, and says he: “Wake Holman’s name shall come right after.” And there it is.
III
I was very carefully and for those times not ignorantly taught in music. Schell, his name was, and they called him “Professor.” He lived over in Georgetown, where he had organized a little group of Prussian refugees into a German club, and from my tenth to my fifteenth year—at first regularly, and then in a desultory way as I came back to Washington City from my school in Philadelphia, he hammered Bach and Handel and Mozart—nothing so modern as Mendelssohn—into my not unwilling nor unreceptive mind, for my bent was in the beginning to compose dramas, and in the end operas.
Adelina Patti was among my child companions. Once in the national capital, when I was 12 years old and Adelina 9, we played together at a charity concert. She had sung “The Last Rose of Summer,” and I had played her brother-in-law’s variation upon “Home, Sweet Home.” The audience was enthusiastic. We were called out again and again. Then we came on the stage together, and the applause increasing I sat down at the keyboard and played an accompaniment with my own interpolations upon “Old Folks At Home,” which I had taught Adelina, and she sang the words. Then they fairly took the roof off.