"Fick it again! fick it again!" cried the child, pushing away the weapon, and desiring to have the experiment repeated.
"That boy will make a general; he neither winked nor dodged," added the inevitable bystander, a cosmopolitan like myself, who is ever at hand on momentous occasions.
To me, the trait of character exhibited by the child is not so much the type of a taste for the rattle of musketry and the odor of gunpowder as of a higher manifestation of soldier-like qualities. After weary days and long nights of the thunder of cannon at Donelson, when ordinary generals would have been disgusted and disheartened by continued failure, Grant persevered, not knowing that he had been beaten, and in tones full of grand significance, though in speech more mature, he repeats his order,—
"Fick it again! fick it again!"
When canal, and squadron, and repeated assaults had failed to reduce Vicksburg, and friend and foe believed that the place was invulnerable, Grant seemed to shout,—
"Fick it again! fick it again!"
When, after the terrible onslaught of the Union army at the Wilderness, no advantage seemed to have been gained, and the time came when Grant's predecessors had fled to recruit in a three months' respite, the heroic leader only said, in substance,—
"Fick it again! fick it again!"
At Spottsylvania he hurled his army again at the rebel host, and then fought battle after battle, never completely succeeding, but never turning his eye or his thought from the object to be gained: he still maintained his baby philosophy, and still issued the order of the day, which was, practically,—
"Fick it again! fick it again!"