THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
ing down stream would stick fast. Those sheepskins with the wool full of gold were the ‘golden fleece,’ don't you see? Then the Greek pirates sailed for those countries and stole the golden fleeces, and occasionally took some native girls along home with them. That was the origin of the myth of Jason and Medea, but the whole thing is substantially as true as anything in history.” Thus he would go on for a while, in the liveliest style, elucidating his story with all the joyousness of new discovery. This theme exhausted, he would jump up, thank us for the pleasant evening he had had, and leave us as abruptly as he had come. He was indeed a happy man, largely owing to his wise abstinence from affairs for which he did not feel himself fitted; and when he died, everybody that knew him regretted he was not permitted to enjoy his happiness some years longer.
To return to the matter of bravery, I imagine that the average man when first going into battle and hearing the roar of cannon and the rattle of musketry and the whistling of bullets feels an instinctive wish to be well out of it. A few will obey that wish and skulk, or run away at the first opportunity. Another limited class will feel that gaudium certaminis, that joy of the conflict, of which the poets speak, and be impatient to rush forward. The majority will promptly gather up their spirits and then in obedience to a sense of patriotic duty or an impulse of honor or of pride, and encouraged by the presence of their comrades, stand their ground and obey the orders of their commanders to the best of their ability. This is the way the moral element supplements temperamental courage or the lack of it. It is a perfectly natural impulse to duck one's head when a cannon-ball rushes over it. I have seen whole regiments do it, almost without exception, and then break out in a laugh. As troops grow more accustomed to the
[ 130 ]
