The Army Mule and Other War Sketches

History > Military > General

Description

by Henry A. Castle

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 longevity of the Mule is proverbial. He lives on and on, until his origin becomes a musty myth, and age erects a tumor on his brow which betokens superb development of spirituality. The endurance of a hallucination is perhaps greater still. Our civil war closed more than thirty years ago. The Mules employed in the army are mostly dead—not so the hallucinations. These still linger, picturesque but fatiguing. There still survives in every northern town and village at least one man who habitually asserts, who is willing to verify by affidavit, worst of all, who steadfastly believes, that he put down the rebellion.

The Mules are not supposed to have understood the war, and consequently can not be expected to hold themselves responsible for its results. But the man of distorted perspective, who measures the circumference of the universe by the diameter of his own egotism, shrinks from no exaltation and shirks no responsibility. He is festooned with self-complacency, wearing always a fourteenth century smile of content.

Controversy is welcome to him, as the advent of a bloomer woman to a social purity club. He relishes argument and he loves to boast. He can readily maintain that his side was eternally right and the other side infernally wrong in the war, for that fact is beginning to be somewhat widely accepted. To establish his own feats is somewhat more difficult, whether he sing like Miriam or howl like Jeremiah in narrating them. But he will cheerfully spend a week in marching one of his deeds past a given point, and skeptics soon discover that it is cheaper 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 as those autumnal days when the golden glory of the sassafras vies with the persimmon's gaudy crimson. Oftenest perhaps he is an ex-captain, for does not every war evolve the greatest captain of the age as its ultimate hero? He may now pass for a respectable citizen, with houses to let and money to burn, who rashly trusts to his imagination when his memory is out of focus, and lets the bloody chasm go on yawning for more gore.

More likely, however, he carries his real estate as well as his religion in his wife's name, fully persuaded that a rolling stone gathers no moss but grinds exceeding fine, razors and tomahawks included. In any event he is a mighty talker before the crowd, bristling with home thrusts that give out a sizzling sound and an odor of roast owl. He is a Chimborazo of noise with an ant-hill of achievement to back it; a miracle of linked hallucinations ludicrously elongated; an extinct incandescent carbon belching black smoke. His sole claim to mention in connection with the useful, unpretentious Mule, is the purely accidental circumstance of their simultaneous military service. He has no other title to consideration in this important historical episode.

Read More or Buy it Now!

Posted in: History