"Ah!" said the colonel, triumphantly, to a bystander, "you see my boys may steal, but they won't lie."
During a battle the interest in the work was so intense as to leave small room for fear, either of the enemy or of superior officers. An Irish private was ordered to take up the colors when the color-bearer was shot down. "By the holy St. Patrick, colonel," said he, "there's so much good shooting here, I haven't a minute's time to waste fooling with that thing."
The desire to get home for a few days developed much ingenuity among the enlisted men. "What do you want, Pat?" asked General Rosecrans, as he rode along the line, inquiring into the wants of his men. "A furlough!" said Pat. "How long has your sister been dead?" asked a sympathetic comrade of a soldier who had obtained a leave on account of the family trouble. "About ten years," was the cool reply. General Thomas asked a man who applied for leave to go and see his wife how long it was since he had seen her. "Over three months," was the answer. "Three months!" exclaimed the general; "why, I haven't seen my wife for three years!" "That may be," said the soldier, "but you see, general, me and my wife ain't o' that sort."
The "intelligent contraband," the irrepressible darky, is one of the few types of mankind that furnish as much fun in real life as on the stage. He was a source of constant amusement in the army. A colored refugee from the Confederate lines brought word, as the only news worth mentioning (referring to himself), that "a man in Culpeper lost a mighty valuable nigger this mornin'." The driver of a commissary wagon exemplified the general non-combativeness of his race, when, in describing his emotions during an attack on the train, he said he felt "like every hair of his head was a bugle, an' dey was all a-playin' 'Home, Sweet Home.'" An officer tried to induce his servant, who was a refugee, to enlist, saying he must trust the Lord to keep him safe. "Well," he said, "I did trust de Lord when I was tryin' to get into de Union lines, but I dun dare resk Him again!"
The army chaplain now and then ran against the rough soldier wit. One of them, who took a practical view of his responsibility for the souls of his regiment, welcomed some recruits with the suggestion that, having joined the army of their country, they should now also join the army of the Lord. "What bounty does He give?" was the irreverent rejoinder. Even in hospital the disposition to look on the humorous side of life—or of death—never forsook men. One who had lost three fingers held up the maimed member and sorrowfully regretted that he "never could hold a full hand again." A pale-faced sufferer in a hospital near a large city was asked by a visiting lady if she could not do something for him. No. Could she not bathe his head? "You may if you want to very much," he replied; "but if you do, you will be the fourteenth lady that has bathed my head this morning." It was an Irish surgeon who remarked that "the man who has lost his finger makes more noise about it than the man who has lost his head." A nurse was shocked one morning to find two attendants noisily hammering and sawing at one end of a ward where a very sick man was lying. In reply to her questions, they said they were making a coffin. "Who for?" "Him"—pointing to the sick man. "Is he going to die?" she asked, much distressed. "The doctor says he is, an' I guess he knows what he give him!" It was a Confederate guerilla who comforted himself, while lying on his hospital cot, with the reflection, "I reckon I killed as many of them as they did of me."
A soldier was wounded by a shell at Fort Wagner. He was going to the rear. "Wounded by a shell?" some one asked. "Yes," he coolly answered. "I was right under the durned thing when the bottom dropped out."
The occurrences in the enemy's country, and stories that originated there, furnished no small portion of the humor that was current during the war. "Where does this road lead to?" asked the lieutenant in command of a reconnoitering party. "It leads to h——!" was the surly reply of the unregenerate rebel thus interrogated. "Well, by the appearance of the inhabitants of this country, I should judge that I'm most there," was the retort. An old man in Georgia was called upon to declare which side he took, and, uncertain as to the identity of his captors, he said: "I ain't took no side; but both sides hev took me!" It must have been his wife who said: "I ain't neither Secesh nor Union—jest Baptist."
The devotion of Southern women to the Confederacy has often been remarked. One of the minor officers of the army, who marched with Sherman to the sea, and who states that he tramped, all told, at least two thousand miles during the war through the South, says that he saw many Southern men who were loyal to the Union, and who regretted the secession of their respective States, but he saw only one Southern woman whom he even suspected to be Union in sentiment. He saw this woman during a foraging expedition in connection with the march to the sea. He had charge of a squad of thirteen men who had marched through the woods some distance away from the army. As they rounded a sharp curve in the road, they suddenly came upon a house almost covered with foliage. In front of the house, and only a few yards from the men, was a woman picking up chips. Her back was toward the soldiers, and she had not noticed their approach. The commanding officer motioned to his men to stop, and, tip-toeing up to the side of the woman, he put his arm around her waist and kissed her. Stepping back a pace or two, he waited for the bitter denunciation and abuse that he was sure would come. The woman, however, straightened herself up, looked at the officer for a moment, and then said slowly: "You'll find me right here every morning a-picking up chips." The officer said he strongly suspected that she was disloyal to the South.
| FUN IN CAMP. |
A military peculiarity of General Bragg's was touched on in the remark that, when he died and approached the gate of heaven and was invited in, the first thing he'd do would be to "fall back." Gen. W. T. Sherman never seemed to suit the Confederates, no matter what he did. One of the prisoners who fell into the hands of his army gave the following graphic expression of the Southern idea of the general: "Sherman gits on a hill, flops his wings and crows; then he yells out: 'Attention, creation! by kingdoms, right wheel, march!' And then we git!" It was a solitary relic left behind after one of Sherman's advances, that, communing with himself, said: "Well, I'm badly whipped and somewhat demoralized, but no man can say I am scattered."