Page:McClure's Magazine volume 10.djvu/591

BY WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE

OUT

went at his work slowly and cautiously, a junior partner's corrugated desk covered with ten days' dust; and where these things were, there also were the jokes about the soldier boys, and a keen, silent pride, and a deep, fervid interest in the wearers of the blue. The only way the poor dumb, stoical brute of a Yankee could show the patriotism that filled his swelling heart was by the spectacle of the flags. In April, everywhere over this good, fair land, flags were flying. Trains carrying soldiers were hurrying from the North, from the East, from the West, to the Southland; and as they sped over the green prairies and the brown mountains, little children on fences greeted the soldiers with flapping scarfs and handkerchiefs and flags; at the stations, crowds gathered to hurrah for the soldiers, and to throw hats into the air, and to unfurl flags. Everywhere it was flags: tattered, smoke-grimed flags in engine cabs; flags in buttonholes; flags on proud poles; flags fluttering everywhere. How gay it was—how sad it was! For the flags may be the signals of coming death; the shadows that they throw may forecast broken hearts. One cannot know how War's horrors will come. They are hidden by the flags. The fluttering of the flags drowns the voice of the tears that may be in the air.

As for the soldier, the citizen soldier, for whom all this pomp and circumstance was created, he seemed to be immensely bored by it. He was apparently preoccupied. He was trying to get the difference firmly fixed in his mind between his hay-foot and his straw-foot. He paid more heed to the training of his left hand to keep out of his trousers pocket on parade than he paid to talk of lofty, heroic ideals.

When the President called for troops in April, the governors of nearly all the States gave the militia men the opportunity to enlist. The National Guards received the opportunity gratefully. They were mostly young fellows, these guardsmen, and they laughed as heartily as the crowd laughed at the jibes about the tin soldiers; but way down in the quiet recesses of his boyish heart, each of the chosen ones prayed to the God of his fathers to let him live to reproach the jibes by some brave deed, magnificently done.

Doubtless the land this spring was budding with millions of hopes of what may happen when Johnny comes marching home. The nature of these hopes is irrelevant here, for this is the story of how Johnny went marching out. Johnny of the American army, the Johnny who responded to the President's call for troops, is a country boy—a boy of the country town. In the country town of

"A minute … over the newspaper … before breakfast."