Page:McClure's Magazine volume 10.djvu/597

Murdock cried: "Hold on, Tom. I'm responsible for you. Say, what you s'pose I'd tell your wife if I let you go over there and get killed?"

After some further argument the private returned. That evening the regiment took a vote on the question whether to stay where it was, to get into the fight, or go back to camp. On the road to camp the Kansas fellows, mistaken for Confederates, were charged by a Michigan regiment. The Kansans, running helter skelter, frightened a Confederate company into flight. When the Kansas men got into Kansas City, they bought the colonel a sword as a recognition of his bravery on the field of battle. The following night the privates broke into his tent, stole the sword, and pawned it for beer. But before the war was over that regiment became one of the best disciplined regiments in the West, and a terror to the enemy.

These few anecdotal lines are written with a purpose in view. That purpose is to show what an adaptive creature the American is. He may not know how to present arms in May, but he can be turned into a clean-cut, well-oiled cog in the fighting engine before the snow flies. To begin with, the American militiaman has this advantage over every recruit on earth: the American knows how to shoot, and he knows all about the mechanism of a gun. The average American boy of the inland States has owned an air-gun before he is ten. He has been hit in the hand, the foot, the arm, or the leg by a "twenty-two" before he is twelve. He has owned a shot-gun before he has grown a mustache. He has learned to hit a squirrel in a tree crotch with a rifle before he is twenty. When he is of age, he can take to pieces any kind of a gun and put it together again. When the American recruit shall get the hang of the machinery of the army and see a battalion working, the mechanical poetry of the thing will fill him with joy. He will take pride in his cogship in it. But now he is a rollicking boy, who is being harrowed ten miles a day over rough roads, in all kinds of weather, for no other reason, so far as he can see, but to satisfy the caprices of an unfeeling superior officer who a few weeks ago drove a delivery wagon. He has no notion of being a hero these days, has the American recruit; but he is enjoying three good meals a day, sleeping like a log at night, and longing for a chance to fight. He is not fearing death, and he is not burdened with dreams of glory. But away down in his Anglo-Saxon heart the American boy feels the call of duty, and again he "hankers" for the fight.

And he is the boy for whom the flags are flying and for whom is all this cheering. The flags make a brave show in the dusty land; as for the cheering, it comes from bonny throats. The dainty white handkerchiefs should dance and be gay now—now, for to-morrow they may be heavy with tears. But tears are good. They make the world better. Sorrow is a great lever that pries the world upward. So war is good for the sorrow that it brings. Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth. And war, that tears the heart-strings of the old; war, that feeds on the flesh of young men; war, with its tragic gaiety, is good. It is one of God's weapons—his rod that chasteneth. Then should the nation bow beneath the rod, and smile back to heaven with the flags, the gay, merry, thoughtless flags.