The excitement grew to fever heat when some shots were heard, and evidently indicated the beginning of the battle. Jack and Harry wanted to rush to the front of the column and take a hand in the affair, but they were stopped by the quartermaster, who said they would only be in the way, and had better wait a while until the colonel sent for them. He ended his suggestion with a peremptory order that they should not leave the wagons without permission.
This was a disappointment, but they bore it as patiently as they could. They were learning the lesson of military life, that the soldier must obey his officer and each officer must obey the word of his own superior, no matter what it may be. As a consolation to them, and also as an illustration of what they must expect in the army, the quartermaster told a story about a volunteer officer during the Mexican war.
This officer had been ordered to do something that he thought highly injudicious. General Scott was standing near, and Captain X———, as we will call him, appealed to the general to know what he should do.
“Obey the order,” was the brief answer of the general.
“But it's absurd,” replied the captain. “Certainly no one should obey an order like that.”
“Always obey your superior officer,” responded the general.
“But suppose my superior officer orders me to jump out of a fourth-story window,” interposed the captain, “must I do it?”
“Certainly,” the general answered; “your superior's duty is to have a feather-bed there to receive you, and you can be sure he 'll have it. That's a part of his business you have nothing to do with.”
This may sound like exaggeration to the young reader who has no knowledge of the ways of military life, but let me assure him that it is nothing of the kind. It is a principle of army discipline that a soldier or officer should unhesitatingly obey the orders he receives without asking for explanations. On the battlefield, regiments, brigades, divisions, are sent as the commander desires for the purposes of carrying out his combinations and plans. It can readily be seen that all discipline would be gone and the combinations and plans could not be carried out if each subordinate commander required an explanation of the reason why he was dispatched in a particular direction or ordered to do a certain thing. Now and then there is an opportunity which an officer embraces for acting on his own hook without orders, but the experienced officer always hesitates lest he lays himself open to censure, and possibly court-martial and punishment, as he surely would if subsequent events showed his action to have been injudicious or disastrous.
The battle turned out to be no battle at all—only a skirmish with some bushwhackers, in which a dozen shots or so were exchanged and nobody was hurt. The advance of the column had come upon a group of men, some mounted and others on foot, near a bend in the road where a small stream was crossed. The sight of the soldiers had disturbed the group; those who had horses rode away as fast as they could go, while the fellows on foot made the best of their way into the bushes, where they sought concealment. They did not obey the order to halt, whereupon a few shots were fired at them, which they returned.