Goose-Quill Papers

by Louise Imogen Guiney

Be it humbly admitted that the freedom I enjoyed among officers and men of several organizations, and the indulgence which they showed, tended not to improve my scarce seraphic disposition. More than once was I called to order for some breach of discipline, the most venial of which were cutting the tent-strings, hanging about the sentry and impeding his progress with efforts to relieve him of his musket, or concealing the drum-sticks to postpone an anticipated signal. The dark-eyed young man to whom I owed allegiance—

"Ay me! while life did last that league was tender,"

—would exclaim, with the awful sense of a newly acquired dignity: "Disobey a colonel if you dare!" and threaten me, not with vulgar deprivations of supper, or trivial captivity in closets, but with a veritable court-martial for my predestined doom, when I should be so bad again.

Our family retinue consisted of a cook of jolly and rubicund exterior, and a pleasant lad, who, among his other duties, cared for my glossy-coated Arabian, and led him about like a circus-master, while I "snatched a fearful joy" upon his back. The memory of the former personage is embalmed in the fragrance of roast beef and mashed potatoes, edibles which he announced frequently with a melodramatic flourish and intonation never to be forgotten. Burly old Bush! He had a quaint way of delivering his best things, stans pede in uno, with a sidelong light of the eye to let you into the secret of his rich hyperboles.

Another favorite of mine was an adjutant, owner of two sociable King Charles spaniels, which I was permitted to endow with portions of my supper, and which I visited as regularly as a country lover his sweetheart, when the general evening relaxation set in. Captain J., too, stern, reticent, and little popular with his men, was strangely gentle to one that rode on his arm, and fell asleep, many a time, at his knee. He was a fascinating story-teller, and held my fancy longer than any soldier-playmate of his day. He had the absolute confidence of my infallible young man. The old figure, "true as steel," was made for him. They forbore to tell me till long afterwards, that he fell, shot through and through, at the Wilderness, with his face to the foe.

He had a brother, a mere boy, whose sunny hair I can remember under the military cap. But him I may come across any hour, prosperous and sunny-haired still. The only other figures plain to my mind's eye are F., the sweet-mannered gentleman who took care of me in a long railway journey; S., the surgeon, maker of jokes and of whistles; W., who used to sing "Malbrook s'en va-t en guerre," with immense satisfaction to himself, at least; and C., an inveterate patriot, who gave his good right arm for the asking, at touch of a cannon-ball.

During that stay there was much gayety and little mishap. My elders rode off to many a hunt, or held tournaments with all the tilting and fair ladies' smiles incidental, nay, essential, to their success. Twice, in the midst of less serious things, the men were called to sleep under arms. I can very well remember, another time, ominous talk of Mosby and his guerillas, and a cloud of dust on the horizon which seemed to betoken his restless squadron. But these were variations on a winter full of pastime, and uncommonly clement and merry. The campaign that followed was so arduous, and involved such heavy losses, that it is cheering to remember the hearty voices of old play-fellows during that genial holiday, to take down the books they used to read from their anchorage on a shelf, and to treasure up the gay incidents that brightened their tragic story.

I recall a waiter of exceeding blackness who impressed me in a Washington hotel, and a sandwich, uncommonly sharp with mustard, obtained on the homeward journey at the Baltimore station, where the city seemed to turn out to feed the very hungry in my person; and nothing at all further, beyond these unspiritual details, till the war drew to a close. For then my best-beloved soldier came home. He was terribly shattered with suffering and fatigue,—how irrevocably hurt I knew not. If "the stars had fallen from heaven to light upon his shoulders," the thunderbolt had fallen too; and the general's insignia was sealed with a minie-ball. After a series of escapes thrilling enough for a dime novel, after a plunge, horse and man, into a ravine, a solitary stampede in a swamp, the loss of a scabbard and a patch of clothing by the familiar brushing of a bomb, and a hole through a cap neatly made by an attentive sharp-shooter, the charmed bullets had hit at last. It was my earliest glimpse of the painful side of the war, when he stood worn, pale, drooping, waiting recognition with a weary smile, at the door of the sunny little house we all loved. Instantly, heedless of any persuasive arms or voices, I slipped headlong, like a startled seal from the rocks, and disappeared under the table. Such was my common mode of receiving strangers; and here, indeed, was a most bewildering and appalling stranger. In vain my soldier called me by the most endearing names; even the whimsical nomenclature of camp-life failed to convince me that this was no imposition. I shut my disbelieving eyes, and crouched on the carpet. For two long hours I did not capitulate, and then but warily. What was this spectre with whom I must not frolic, on whose shoulders I must not perch, whose head, bound in bandages, I must not handle? What was he, in place of my old-time comrade, blithe and boyish, and how could he expect to inherit the confidence I had given to quite another sort of person? Unhallowed Dixie! How it had cozened me out of what I prized most!

The wound that jarred upon me, I quickly came to consider as an admirable distinction, and altogether proper and desirable. I longed to be shot, in the interests of my native land; and presently, "by the foot of Pharaoh!" so I was, thanks to a pistol in the hands of a maladroit little neighbor. I underwent the ether-sponge and the knife, and my chubby cheek displayed with pride the reduced fac-simile of the parental scar. It was my day of jubilee, ere the cicatrice had vanished, when I might lean against that elder veteran's knee, and recount Munchausen-like tales of "our" prowess in the war.