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79 pages

English

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What was military life like in the early twentieth century? That question is answered from a number of unique angles in the collection The Army Mule and Other War Sketches. While most military fiction of the era adopted a top-down approach, focusing on the experiences and perceptions of the powerful military leadership, the vignettes in this collection tend to favor the lower-ranking soldiers on the front line.

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Humour

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Publié par	The Floating Press
Date de parution	01 juin 2012
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781775459989
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0134€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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THE ARMY MULE
AND OTHER WAR SKETCHES
* * *
HENRY A. CASTLE

*
The Army Mule And Other War Sketches First published in 1897 ISBN 978-1-77545-998-9 © 2012 The Floating Press and its licensors. All rights reserved. While every effort has been used to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the information contained in The Floating Press edition of this book, The Floating Press does not assume liability or responsibility for any errors or omissions in this book. The Floating Press does not accept responsibility for loss suffered as a result of reliance upon the accuracy or currency of information contained in this book. Do not use while operating a motor vehicle or heavy equipment. Many suitcases look alike. Visit www.thefloatingpress.com
Contents
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The Army Mule The Sutler The Shelter Tent Dress Parade The Boys in Blue Grown Gray
*
I hail thee Brother—spite of the fool's scorn! And fain would take thee with me, in the dell Of peace and mild Equality to dwell, Where Toil shall call the charmer Health his bride, And Laughter tickle Plenty's ribless side! How thou wouldst toss thy heels in gamesome play, And frisk about, as lamb or kitten gay! Yea! and more musically sweet to me Thy dissonant harsh bray of joy would be, Than warbled melodies that soothe to rest The aching of pale Fashion's vacant breast! —COLERIDGE.
The Army Mule
*
I
The longevity of the Mule is proverbial. He lives on and on, until hisorigin becomes a musty myth, and age erects a tumor on his brow whichbetokens superb development of spirituality. The endurance of ahallucination is perhaps greater still. Our civil war closed more thanthirty years ago. The Mules employed in the army are mostly dead—notso the hallucinations. These still linger, picturesque but fatiguing.There still survives in every northern town and village at least oneman who habitually asserts, who is willing to verify by affidavit,worst of all, who steadfastly believes, that he put down therebellion.
The Mules are not supposed to have understood the war, andconsequently can not be expected to hold themselves responsible forits results. But the man of distorted perspective, who measures thecircumference of the universe by the diameter of his own egotism,shrinks from no exaltation and shirks no responsibility. He isfestooned with self-complacency, wearing always a fourteenth centurysmile of content.
Controversy is welcome to him, as the advent of a bloomer woman to asocial purity club. He relishes argument and he loves to boast. He canreadily maintain that his side was eternally right and the other sideinfernally wrong in the war, for that fact is beginning to be somewhatwidely accepted. To establish his own feats is somewhat moredifficult, whether he sing like Miriam or howl like Jeremiah innarrating them. But he will cheerfully spend a week in marching one ofhis deeds past a given point, and skeptics soon discover that it ischeaper to feed him than to fight him. He may be an ex-major-general,or possibly an ex-teamster. Sometimes he is an ex-corporal, mellow asthose autumnal days when the golden glory of the sassafras vies withthe persimmon's gaudy crimson. Oftenest perhaps he is an ex-captain,for does not every war evolve the greatest captain of the age as itsultimate hero? He may now pass for a respectable citizen, with housesto let and money to burn, who rashly trusts to his imagination whenhis memory is out of focus, and lets the bloody chasm go on yawningfor more gore.
More likely, however, he carries his real estate as well as hisreligion in his wife's name, fully persuaded that a rolling stonegathers no moss but grinds exceeding fine, razors and tomahawksincluded. In any event he is a mighty talker before the crowd,bristling with home thrusts that give out a sizzling sound and an odorof roast owl. He is a Chimborazo of noise with an ant-hill ofachievement to back it; a miracle of linked hallucinations ludicrouslyelongated; an extinct incandescent carbon belching black smoke. Hissole claim to mention in connection with the useful, unpretentiousMule, is the purely accidental circumstance of their simultaneousmilitary service. He has no other title to consideration in thisimportant historical episode.
He is not a typical old soldier, and must not be so classified. He isan exception. When tests are to be applied he can always prove analibi. His mouth was put on soft and spread; the flush on his nose wasacquired at a great expenditure of time and money. He comes to thefront in his community, sage of the flannel lip and velvet eye, inaccordance with a known law that not always the ablest men are heard,but always the ablest to be heard. He comes to the front with thepersistence of a pardoned anarchist, and the flawless joy of ayearling who has maxed in math.
Meantime it is one of the everlasting verities that in hands of men"entirely" great, the calligraph is mightier than the bludgeon. Shallcalligraphs stand dumb and the story of days when God shook the nationuntil her lakes foamed over their pebbly shores and her riversgurgled with bloody ebullition remain unwrit, in fear of probingblow-holes in the record of some grand snark in the concatenated orderof hoo hoos? Shall posterity be given over to moral mushiness, lestsome village Goliath of Gath, prone to such nightly exhilaration ofspirits as ends in losing the combination of adjacent streets, getshrunken into shreds of paper-rag, brain-web and vapor?
Historians of the war have minutely narrated its grand events—eventswhich rising generations are already reproaching themselves for comingtoo late to engage in, being relegated to their own nerveless annalspenciled on the segment of a film. Most classes of participants inthese events have been heard from. Either in plain narrative orwrathful controversy they have ventured an enormous consumption oftime and eternity. Whether their anger be a dynamite shell or asoap-bubble, its vocalization is uniformly terrific. The generals andthe majors; the teamsters and the staff; even the drafted men andsubstitutes, unstable as the heroine who vowed at first that she wouldnever consent, and then relented—all these have spoken or can speakfor themselves. Majestically muscled around the mouth, staunchlynerved in the cheek, they need no rhetorical proxy. Since history hasaccepted most of their averments, they modestly consider themselvesendorsed.
There are other classes of participants who must be spoken for—theirmerits have not yet become the theme of tropical, topical songs. Thespeechless toilers of the conflict, half horse, half devil, halfdonkey, stand high on the list of those who should not be forgotten.We may fling flash-lights of inspection all around the black horizonof war and find no greater faithfulness, not even in Israel.
Under the cadence of march, murmur of camp, clangor of battle andreverberating paeans of victory, rumbles the ground tone of all war'sharmonies, the deep contra basso of a melodious bray, reminding usthat justice remains yet to be done to the instrument which madecampaigns successful and battles possible. It is an instrument towhich due credit has never been given, yet which is infinitely morecredit-worthy than many of the boasters, "ablest to be heard," whomake the cackle of their villages noxious to mankind.
That instrument is the Army Mule! Let him who hath ears to hear lendthem now to a belated attempt at vindication. Let the man of prejudicedisinfect his mind and listen. It is naught, saith the buyer, thengoeth his way and boasteth; but an ad valorem tax on dudes has neverbeen made to yield any revenue.
The name of the original inventor of the Mule is lost in theimmemorial mists. Although, as hereinbefore intimated, his longevityis a chestnut as old as the Morse alphabet, or older, his nativity isstill a conundrum. No Mule's teeth, with or without gold filling,glisten among shells of the pliocene period. No Mule elevates hisafterdeck in the granitic formations. None of his petrified footprintsare discernible in those anteglacial basins where Afric's sunnyfountains now sprinkle her shirtless swarms. Hence, although hepossibly antedates all living apostles of lady suffrage, he ispresumably not a pre-Adamite. Perhaps his first discoverer was "thatAnah" who, to his astonishment, "found Mules in the wilderness," wheredonkeys had been browsing, etc. See Genesis xxxvi, 24. It is notpermissible to go behind the returns. What we know is that he wasintroduced to the American people by anticipation, that is to say,through his paternal ancestor, by G. Washington, Esq., of Mount Vernonin Virginia.
Much sarcasm, variegated as Paris green jealousy and red precipitatewrath could dye it, has been expended on this delicate matter of theMule's paternal ancestry. Among other spiteful things it has beenaverred that like certain party organizations he has no more groundfor pride of descent than he has for hope of posterity. Let uspromptly concede the validity of the averment. Argue not with onesteeped in kerosene and other fire-waters; matters look ominous when adisputant opens the discussion with foam on his teeth and noises inhis nostril. Fill blanks as to name of party by majority vote of thosepresent, and let the proceedings proceed.
It is doubtless true that the speechless, unspeakable Mule, seldomtroubles himself about his heirs, executors or administrators. Whyshould he? He is a monstrosity, physical and metaphysical; the neplus ultra , the "nothing beyond" of his species. Besides, he haslittle of value to bequeath; he is a disinherited prodigal, withchampagne tastes and a root beer revenue, digesting his diet of wildoats; his assets would scarcely overbalance those of a disbanded UncleTom troupe—one blood hound, one death-bed, and two cakes of imitationice. Moreover, truth to tell, he is probably in no special haste todie. This amiable weakness is shared by certain of our own race.
A hypercritical Boston lady, mistress of the mysteries of nine idio