“P.S. I am awful oblidged to you.”
III
IN THE BACK
Force, as you may know, is like the King, and never dies. It endlessly transmits itself through the same or some other shape. Drop a stone in a pond, and the wave-rings may seem to expire as they widen, but they do not; through friction or impact or something, they merely become invisible. You can stop a cannon-ball, but you cannot kill its speed; its speed is immortal and undergoes instant resurrection, taking the new shape of heat. The cannon-ball becomes red hot and sends heat waves off into infinity. Scientific men have told you all this as they have told me, and judging from the delightful events which I shall proceed to narrate, I should not wonder if the scientific men were right.
I. The Storing of the Energy
Once upon a time the army had a wet-nurse instead of a secretary of war. The nurse fed our soldiers upon speeches, milk-and-sugar speeches, all over the country. He told them he was going to right their wrongs. Now, as they didn’t know that they had any wrongs, this both surprised and pleased them. They liked to hear him inform them that it was they who from the first had won our battles upon land and sea. “Who” (he would ask rhetorically), “who endured the bitter cold, the frozen snow, at Valley Forge?” And as they hadn’t the slightest idea, what more agreeable than to learn it was themselves? “Let us honor George Washington” (he would exclaim), “let us not forget that great and good man! but let us remember also the honest soldier without whose aid George Washington could never have durriven the Burritish tyrant from our beloved shores of furreedom!”
He always spoke of the “honest” soldier, and therefore the average enlisted man very naturally felt that somehow George Washington, Andrew Jackson and Ulysses Grant were all well enough in their way, but that you must keep your eye on them, and that the Secretary was the man to put them in their proper place. The Secretary quite rightly omitted to state that generals are apt to carry a responsibility which would iron the average enlisted man flatter than a pair of pressed trousers; he omitted this statement because it would have been the whole truth, and the whole truth is often very tiresome, particularly for a politician. Do not, as you read this, think evil of the Secretary; he had a large family of daughters and sons with whom he was frequently photographed, seated on the vine-clad porch of the old white homestead, and these photographs were at once widely given to the public press. Moreover, his private life was known to be chaste by every lady in the land, though how they ascertained this I am at a loss to explain. He was also a highly gifted man; gifted with the voice that matches a political frock-coat. At will he could make this so impressive, that if he remarked it was a fine day, for the time of year, it convinced the audience that something of the utmost importance had been announced. He was gifted, too, with a face impervious to vulgar scrutiny, and he had the most deeply religious chinbeard in Apple-Jack county. I have already mentioned that he possessed the gift of tears, when such phenomenon was timely, and besides all these things, he owned some extensive salt-marshes on a bay. These were too wet for private persons to buy, but he was going to be happy to sell them to the government for a naval station when he should be Senator, after his present office had expired. Meanwhile he went about busily with his basket, collecting popularity from the humblest dumping lot.
If there was one kind of audience that the Secretary liked above all others, it was an audience of fresh, bright, brave, young recruits. He missed no chance to tell them so. Their earnest faces, he was apt to say if there was a flag anywhere in sight, stirred his heart more, much more than the stars upon Old Glory waving yonder. Then he would point to Old Glory, and get results from the gallery as satisfactory as any actor could wish. Indeed, the Secretary could have made the drama as lucrative as he made politics. He could tell a story and make you laugh, tell another and make you cry, and a really excellent second-rate actor was lost in him. In the good old days of which I write, many of our political patriots resembled the Secretary.
Recruits after his own heart sat close before him one afternoon at McPherson, gathered from various Southern States.
“Let those young men come up front!” he had commanded from the platform in his deepest frock-coat basso. “Let them see me and let me see them. We understand each other, for we are comrades.”
Accordingly, the recruits occupied the front benches, while the mustache of Captain Stone, who sat in the rear of the hall, began to look like the back of a dog’s neck when the dog is not pleased. The captain took down one leg that had been crossed over the other, and began sliding one hand up and down the yellow stripe of his trousers. To his brother officers and to his favorite sergeant, Jones, this hand sliding was another sign, like the singular behavior of the mustache. Nobody knew whether it was the hair itself that rose, or whether he did it with his upper lip; but when the whole thing stood straight out beyond his nose, everybody knew at a hundred yards’ range what it meant, no matter how it was done. It was the hurricane signal and you steered your course accordingly.