Miss Ravenel's conversion from secession to loyalty

by John William De Forest

"Well, I'll try. But I really fear that I shall just get my company recruited in time for the next war."

"Never fear," laughed Carter, as though war were a huge practical joke. "We are in for a four or five years' job of fighting."

"You don't mean it!" said the young man in amazement. "Why, we citizens are all so full of confidence. McClellan, every body says, is organizing a splendid army. Did Bull Run give you such an opinion of the superior fighting qualities of the southerners?"

"Not at all. Both sides fought timidly, as a rule, just as greenhorns naturally would do. The best description of the battle that I have heard was given in a single sentence by my old captain, Lamar, now in command of a Georgia regiment. Said he, 'There never was a more frightened set than our fellows—except your fellows.—Why, we outfought them in the morning; we had them fairly whipped until Johnston came up on our right. The retreat was a mathematical necessity; it was like saying, Two and two make four. When our line was turned, of course it had to retreat."

"Retreat!" groaned Colburne in bitterness over the recollection of that calamitous afternoon. "But you didn't see it. They ran shamefully, and never stopped short of Washington. One man reached New Boston inside of twenty-four hours. It was a panic unparalleled in history."

"Nonsense! Beg your pardon. Did you never read of Austerlitz and Jena and Waterloo? Our men did pretty well for militia. I didn't see the panic, to be sure;—I was picked up before that happened. But I have talked with some of our officers who did see it, and they told me that the papers exaggerated it absurdly. Newspaper correspondents ought not to be allowed in the army. They exaggerate every thing. If we had gained a victory, they would have made it out something greater than Waterloo. You must consider how easily inexperience is deceived. Just get the story of an upset from an old stage-driver, and then from a lady passenger; the first will tell it as quite an ordinary affair, and the second will make it out a tragedy. Now when some old grannies of congressmen and some young ladies of newspaper reporters, none of whom had ever seen either a victory or a defeat before, got entangled among half a dozen disordered regiments they naturally concluded that nothing like it had happened in history. I tell you that it wasn't unparalleled, and that it ought not to have been considered surprising. Whichever of those two green armies got repulsed was pretty sure to be routed. That was a very pretty manœuvre, though, that coming up of Johnston on our right. Patterson ought to be court-martialed for his stupidity."

"Stupidity! He is a traitor," exclaimed Colburne.

"Oh! oh!" expostulated the Colonel with a cough. "If we are to try all our dull old gentlemen as traitors, we shall have our hands full. That's something like hanging homely old women for witches.—By the way, how are the Allstons? I mean the—the Ravenels. Well, are they? Young lady as blooming and blushing as ever? Glad to hear it. Can't stop to call on them; my train goes in ten minutes.—I am delighted that you are going to fall in with me. Good bye for to-day."

Away he went, leaving Colburne in wonder over his contrasts of slanginess and gentility, his mingled audacity and insouciance of character, and all the picturesque ins and outs of his moral architecture, so different from the severe plainness of the spiritual temples common in New Boston. The young man would have preferred that his future Colonel should not drink and swear; but he would not puritanically decide that a man who drank and swore could not be a good officer. He did not know army men well enough to dare judge them with positiveness; and he certainly would not try them by the moral standards according to which he tried civilians. The facts that Carter was a professional soldier, and that he had shed his blood in the cause of the country, were sufficient to make Colburne regard with charity all his frank vices.

I must not allow the reader to suppose that I present Carter as a type of all regular officers. There were men in the old army who never tasted liquors, who never blasphemed, who did not waste their substance in riotous living, who could be accused of no evil practices, who were models of Christian gentlemen. The American service, as well as the English, had its Havelocks, its Headly Vicars, its Colonel Newcomes. Nevertheless I do venture to say that it had also a great many men whose moral habits were cut more or less on the Carter pattern, who swore after the fashion of the British army in Flanders, whose heads could carry drink like Dugald Dalgetty's, and who had even other vices concerning which my discreet pen is silent.