Hardtack and coffee

by John Davis Billings

To bow in meek submission to the uneducated authority of the civilian, or to the soldier whose record was such as not to command the respect of his fellows, was the lot of thousands of intelligent and brave soldiers, the superiors in all respects, save that of military rank alone, of these self-same officers; and to be commanded not to answer back, when they felt that they must utter a protest against injustice, was a humiliation that the average volunteer did not fully realize when he put his name to the roll,—a humiliation which grew bitterer with every new indignity. Punishments or rebukes administered by social inferiors were galling even when deserved.

ON THE CHINES.

It seems ludicrous to me when I recall the threats I used to hear made against officers for some of their misdeeds. Many a wearer of shoulder-straps was to be shot by his own men in the first engagement. But, somehow or other, when the engagement came along there seemed to be Rebels enough to shoot without throwing away ammunition on Union men; and about that time too the men, who in more peaceful retreats were so anxious to shoot their own officers, could not always be found, when wanted, to shoot more legitimate game. In these days, when private soldiers are so scarce and officers so exceedingly abundant, the question might very naturally arise how the abundance came about if the officers were so often between two fires; but what I have said will furnish a solution to the mystery.

Then, there were hundreds of officers that were to be settled with when they reached home, and were on an equality with the private soldier so far as military rank was concerned. But while there were, as I have previously intimated, a few who took their resentments out of the service with them, they were only few in number, and it is doubtful whether any of them ever executed their threatened deeds of violence. Poor underpaid non-commissioned officers, who occupied the perplexing and uncomfortable position of go-betweens, were frequently invited by privates to strip off their chevrons and be handsomely whipped for some act annoying to said privates; but I never heard of any n. c. o. sacrificing his chevrons to any such ambition—for various reasons, of which the fear of a thrashing was not necessarily one.

A WOODEN OVERCOAT.

There were regiments each of which, when off duty, seemed to contain at least two or three hundred colonels and captains, so much social freedom obtained between officers and rank and file, yet at the proper time there was just one commander of such a regiment to whom the men looked ready to do his bidding, even to follow him into the jaws of death. These officers were not always devout men; at an earlier period in their lives some of them may have learned to be profane; some drank commissary whiskey occasionally, it may be; but in all their dealings with subordinates, while they made rigid exactions of them as soldiers, they never forgot that they were men, and hence, endeavoring to be just in the settlement of camp troubles, protecting their command in the full enjoyment of all its rights among similar organizations, never saying “go!” but “come!” in the hour of danger, they welded their regiment into a military engine as solid and reliable as the old Grecian Phalanx. Punishments in such regiments were rare, for manliness and self-respect were never crushed out by tyrants in miniature. The character of the officers had so much to do with determining the nature and amount of the punishments in the army that I consider what I have thrown in here as germane to the subject of this chapter.

It should be said, in justice to both officers and privates, that the first two years of the war, when the exactions of the service were new, saw three times the number of punishments administered in the two subsequent years; but, aside from the getting accustomed to the restraints of the service, campaigning was more continuous in the later years, and this kept both mind and body occupied. It is inactivity which makes the growler’s paradise. Then, in the last years of the war the rigors of military discipline, the sharing of common dangers and hardships, and promotions from the ranks, had narrowed the gap between officers and privates so that the chords of mutual sympathy were stronger than before, and trivial offences were slightly rebuked or passed unnoticed.