The most remarkable illustration of this peculiarity of veteran troops which I can recall occurred during Sherman's battle at Chattanooga. Leaving a fortified line, the Union troops of Colonel Loomis and Generals Mathias, Corse, and Raum were required to cross a small valley and assault a rebel fort located on a steep hill, three hundred feet high, and of very rugged ascent. When the troops selected moved out in the line of reserves and marched down into the valley, the rebels, having full view of the column, grew excited and noisy. The orders of their officers were shouted, and were plainly heard in our lines, and, though it was impossible for the assaulting column to prepare for its work under an hour's time, the rebels evinced every indication of excitement, rushing hither and thither, and growing noisier every moment. The Union troops, on the contrary, prepared for the work slowly and quietly, with an unusually serious and composed air. They glanced up ever and anon at the steep hill before them, and many doubtless compared the mountain to the Walnut Hills of Vicksburg, where they met their first repulse. The assault was made in as serious a manner as the preparations. There was no breath wasted in loud cries. The men twice assaulted with desperate courage, were badly repulsed by a flanking force, and driven in confusion across the valley to their line of reserves, but, as they came back, passing through General Sherman's field-quarters, they looked as defiantly as ever, admitting no more than "that they had failed this time." There was no panic, no despair. They saw they had failed from sheer inability, not a want of effort or disposition to accomplish their task. They retreated, but not rushing wildly far to the rear. The powerful aided the weak, the strong bore off the wounded, and each came back as he had advanced, cool, composed, and serious.

The veteran when in camp had no curiosity. His indifference to matters going on around him was positively appalling to a stranger or a raw recruit. They would often be in camp for a month without knowing or caring what regiment was encamped next to them. A raw recruit of two months' standing was better authority on all on dits of camp, the location of other regiments, the names of their officers, and similar general information, than a veteran of three years' standing. The veteran laughed at the knowledge of the raw recruit, wondered where the utility of that information was, boasted of superior practical knowledge, and good-naturedly taught the raw recruit the more useful lessons of how to march easily, sleep well, provide himself with little luxuries, and how to take care of himself generally. The veteran had curious modes of making himself comfortable, which the raw recruit learned only from practice. Camp the veteran in a forest over night, and he would sleep under his shelter-tent raised high and made commodious, and on a soft bed of dry leaves. Encamp him for a month in the same forest, and he would live in a log house, sleep on good clean straw, dine off a wooden table, drink from glassware made from the empty ale or porter bottles from the sutler's tent, comb his whiskers before a framed looking-glass on a pine-board mantle-shelf, and look with the air of a millionaire through a foot and a half square window-frame on the camped world around him. The rebels used to call our men, when working on forts, rifle-pits, etc., "beavers in blue." The veteran was a regular beaver when building his house. He would buy, beg, or steal from the quarter-master (a species of theft recognized by the camp code of morals as entirely justifiable) the only tool he needed, an axe. With this he would cut, hew, dig, drive—any thing you like, in fact. With his axe he would cut the logs for his cabin—miniature logs, two inches in diameter—trim them to the proper length, and drive the necessary piles. With his axe he would cut the brushwood or the evergreen, and thatch his roof. With his axe he would dig a mud-hole in which to make his plaster for filling the crevices of the logs, and thus shut out the cold. Doors, chimneys, benches, chairs, tables, all the furniture of his commodious house, he would make with the same instrument. When all was finished, he would sit comfortably down on his cot and laugh at the superficial knowledge of the raw recruit who had been shivering in his shelter-tent, looking on in amazement at the magical labors of the "beavers in blue."

If Napoleon could revisit the "glimpses of the moon," he would doubtless laugh—perhaps his nephew really does laugh at the idea of our calling the victors of this short-lived rebellion "veterans"—or with that sternness with which he once reproved his marine secretary, Truget, for propagating "the dangerous opinion that a soldier could be trained to all his duties in six months," the first Napoleon would ask us, with a look of imperial scorn, to show him in our boasted army a corps like the eighteen thousand troops of the French Monarchy that under his discipline became the Old Guard, which "died, but never surrendered." Julius Cæsar would doubtless smile at our presumption, and point to the old veteran legions of his armies with which he overran Europe, and into which no recruit was admitted until after eight years' service and discipline in other ranks, and ask us for veterans like his. Our soldiers were not, perhaps, the veterans for Napoleon or Cæsar, nor for such purpose as those of Napoleon or Cæsar, but they were such veterans as perished with Leonidas at Thermopylæ, and won victory in following Arnold Yon Wilkenried in the mountain passes of Switzerland. Nothing can be sublimer than the patient heroism displayed by the veterans of the "War for the Union;" and when Time shall have hallowed, as it will, the yet familiar scenes of that struggle, tinting the story with a hue of romance, rounding the irregularities in the characters of the leaders, and toning down the rude points in the characters of the men, forgetting their excesses and remembering only their devotion and daring, the heroes and veterans who fought for the unity of the land will loom up as sacred in our eyes as are those who, in ages past, fought for its independence and liberty.

INDEX.

THE END.

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