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In coming home from the prairie, we generally rode round by the way of a certain sunken garden that stood a couple of feet below the level of the road. A five-foot picket-fence that stood at the roadside had fallen over toward the garden, so that its top was hardly four feet higher than the road. This made the most satisfactory leap we ever took,—the long, sailing descent, and the safe landing on sandy loam, satisfied so completely one’s prudent love of danger.
I think I missed this leap more than anything at Lebanon when, finally, we set out for Arkansas.
We made our first considerable halt early in May, at Batesville, on the White River,—a lovely, rose-grown village, carrying, in the neatly kept home of its New England secessionists, evidence that they remembered their native land, where, in their day, before the age of railroads, the “village” flourished in all its freshness and simplicity. It had now acquired the picturesque dilapidation, in the manner of fences and gates and defective window-panes, that marked the Southern domicile during the war. Ruby had strained himself quite seriously during the march, and had been left to come on slowly with the quartermaster’s train. This left me quite free for the social life, such as it was, to which we—the only available men that had been seen there since Price gathered his forces at Springfield—were welcomed with a reserved cordiality. Our facilities for forming a correct opinion of society were not especially good, but I fancied I should have passed my time to as good advantage in the saddle.
We soon left for an active expedition in the direction of Little Rock, of which it is only necessary to say, here, that it lasted about a month, and brought the writer acquainted with some very unsatisfactory horses,—a fact which heightened his pleasure, on striking the White River bottom again, at finding that Ruby had been brought over the ferry to meet him. Tired as I was, I took a glorious brisk trot through the Canebrake Road, with a couple of leaps over fallen trees, that revived the old emotions and made a man of me again.
While we lay at Batesville we were unusually active in the matter of drill and reorganization; and this, with our engagements in the town, kept us too busy for much recreation; but Ludlow and I managed to work in a daily swim in the White River, with old saddles on our horses, and scant clothing on our persons. Talk of aquatic sports! there is no royal bath without a plucky horse to assist; and a swim across the swift current at Batesville, with a horse like Ruby snorting and straining at every stroke, belittled even the leaping at Lebanon.
From Batesville we commenced our memorable march to join the fleet that had just passed Memphis, following down the left bank of the river to Augusta, and then striking across the cotton country to Helena,—a march on which we enjoyed the rarest picturesqueness of plantation life, and suffered enough from heat and hunger and thirst, and stifling, golden dust to more than pay for it.
Helena was a pestiferous swamp, worth more than an active campaign to our enemies, filling our hospitals, and furrowing the levee bank with graves. It was too hot for much drilling, and we kept our better horses in order by daybreak races. With the local fever feeling its way into my veins, I was too listless to care much for any diversion; but Ike came to me one evening to say that he “reckoned” Ruby was as good a horse as anybody had in the “camps,” and he might as well take a hand in the games. I told him I had no objection to his being run, if he could find a suitable boy, but that both he and I were too heavy for race-riding.
“I don’t weigh only about a hundred and a half,” said the ambitious man.
“Well, suppose you don’t, that is ten pounds too much.”
“I reckon a man can ride ten pound lighter ’n he is if he knows how to ride; anyhow, if Rube can’t skin anything around here, I don’t know nothin’ about horses.”
“Ike, did you ever run that horse?”
“Well, Colonel, now you ask me, I did jest give Dwight’s darkey a little brush once.”
Conquering my indignation and my scruples, I went over, just for the honor of the establishment, and made up a race for the next day.
I have seen crack race-horses in my time, but I never saw more artistic riding nor more capital running than that summer morning on the River Road at Helena, just as the sun began to gild the muddy Mississippi. The satisfaction of this conquest, and the activity with which new engagements were offered by ambitious lieutenants, who little knew the stuff my man and horse were made of, kept off my fever for some weeks; but I steadily declined all opportunity of racing with horses outside of our command, for I had been reared in a school of Puritan severity, and had never quite overcome my convictions against the public turf. A corporal of an “Injeanny regement” took occasion to crow lustily—so I heard—because “one of them French coveys” was afraid to run him a quarter for five dollars. It appeared that a cleanly European was always supposed by this gentry to be French; and in the army at large I was better known by the company I kept than by my New England characteristics.
Naturally, Ike thought that, while Ruby was engaged in this more legitimate occupation, he ought not to be ridden for mere pleasure; and it was only when a visitor was to be entertained, or when I went out on plea of duty, that I could steal an opportunity to leap him; but he took one fence that fairly did him credit. It was a snake fence measuring four feet and two inches, with a deep ditch on each side cut close to the projecting angles of the rails. Ruby carried me over the first ditch into the angle between the rails, then over the fence into the narrow space on the other side, and then over the second ditch into the field. It was the most perfect combination of skill, strength, and judgment that was possible to horse-flesh; and I think Gluckmansklegge, who was with me and had suggested the venture, despaired of ever getting his promotion by any fair means, when we rejoined him by the return leap and rode safely to camp.
Unhappily, even entire satisfaction with one’s horse is powerless to ward off such malaria as that of the camp at Helena, and in due time I fell ill with the fever. The horse was turned over to the care of the quartermaster, and Ike and I came wearily home on sick-leave.
Late in the autumn we returned to St. Louis, where one of the German officers told me that the regiment had joined Davidson’s army at “Pilot K-nopp”; and after the Hun, our new adjutant, arrived from the East, we set out for headquarters, and took command of the cavalry brigade of Davidson’s army.
From November until January we were tossed about from post to post, wearing out our horses, wearying our men, and accomplishing absolutely nothing of value beyond the destruction of an enormous amount of the rough forage, which would otherwise have been used to feed “nags,”—stolen or to be stolen,—and would have thus tended to foster the prevailing vice of the region.
At last we settled down in a pleasant camp at Thomasville,—a good twelve miles away from Davidson,—and were at rest; it was only those near him who suffered from his fitful caprices, and he was now encamped with the infantry.
Pleasant as we found it with our little duty and much sport, I can never look back to Thomasville without sorrow. To say that I had acquired a tenderness for Ruby would not be strictly just; but I felt for him all the respect and admiration and fondness that is possible short of love. Vix had been my heroine, and my only one; but Ruby was my hero, and I depended on him for my duty and my pleasure more than I knew. With his full measure of intelligence he had learned exactly his rôle, and he was always eager, whenever occasion offered, to show the world what a remarkably fine horse I had,—being himself conscious, not only of his unusual virtues, but, no less, of the praise they elicited.
One sunny Southern day, toward the end of January, Davidson had ridden over, with his following, to dine with us; and as we were sitting before our mess-tent, mellow with after-dinner talk of our guns and our dogs and our horses, the General was good enough to remember that he had seen me riding a chestnut that he thought much too finely bred for field work: had I been able to keep him? Then Ruby was discussed, and all his successes were recalled, first by one friend and then by another, until Davidson needed ocular proof of our truthfulness.
Ike had taken the hint, and brought Ruby round in due time,—glistening like gold in the slanting rays of the setting sun, but blundering along with his head down and ears drooping in his old, dismal way.
“O no, I don’t mean that horse,” said Davidson; “I mean a very high-strung horse I have seen you ride on the march.”
“Very well, General, that is the animal; he keeps his strings loose when he is not at his work.”
“No, I have seen you riding a far better horse than that; I am too old a cavalryman to be caught by such chaff.”
To the great glee of the Hun, whose faith in Ruby was unbounded, Davidson’s whole staff turned the laugh on me for trying to deceive the General just because he had been dining.
I mounted, and started off with one of Ruby’s enormous lifts, that brought the whole company to their feet. It was the supreme moment with him. Full of consciousness, as though he knew the opportunity would never come again, and quivering in anticipation of his triumph, he was yet true to his training, and held himself subject to my least impulse.
We had lain in our camp for more than a week, and there was not a vestige left of the recently substantial fences,—only the suggestive and conspicuous gateways that stood to mark the march of our armies from the Chesapeake to the Indian Nation. But Ruby built fences in his imagination higher than any he had ever faced, and cleared them without a scratch, landing close as though the Helena ditch were still to be taken.
It would take long to tell all he did and how perfectly he did it; he went back at last to his canvas blanket, loaded with adulation, and as happy as it is given a horse to be.
In his leaping he had started a shoe, and Ike took him in the morning to the smith (who had taken possession of an actual forge), to have it reset. A moment later, the Hun cried, “My God, Colonel, look at Ruby!”
Hobbling along with one hind foot drawn up with pain, he was making his last mournful march, and we laid him that day to rest,—as true a friend and as faithful a fellow as ever wore a chestnut coat.
He had reared in the shop, parted his halter, and fallen under a bench, breaking his thigh far up above the stifle.
WETTSTEIN
It is a pleasant thing to be a colonel of cavalry in active field-service. There are circumstances of authority and responsibility that fan the latent spark of barbarism which, however dull, glows in all our breasts, and which generations of republican civilization have been powerless to quench. We may not have confessed it even to ourselves; but on looking back to the years of the war, we must recognize many things that patted our vanity greatly on the back,—things so different from all the dull routine of equality and fraternity of home, that those four years seem to belong to a dreamland, over which the haze of the life before them and of the life after them draws a misty veil. Equality and Fraternity! a pretty sentiment, yes, and full of sensible and kindly regard for all mankind, and full of hope for the men who are to come after us; but Superiority and Fraternity! who shall tell all the secret emotions this implies? To be the head of the brotherhood, with the unremitted clank of a guard’s empty scabbard trailing before one’s tent-door day and night; with the standard of the regiment proclaiming the house of chief authority; with the respectful salute of all passers, and the natural obedience of all members of the command; with the shade of deference that even comrades show to superior rank; and with that just sufficient check upon coarseness during the jovial bouts of the headquarters’ mess, making them not less genial, but void of all offence,—living in this atmosphere, one almost feels the breath of feudal days coming modified through the long tempestuous ages to touch his cheek, whispering to him that the savage instinct of the sires has not been, and never will be, quite civilized out of the sons. And then the thousand men, and the yearly million that they cost, while they fill the cup of the colonel’s responsibility (sometimes to overflowing), and give him many heavy trials,—they are his own men; their usefulness is almost of his own creation, and their renown is his highest glory.
I may not depict the feelings of others; but I find in the recollection of my own service—as succeeding years dull its details and cast the nimbus of distance about it—the source of emotions which differ widely from those to which our modern life has schooled us.
One of the colonel’s constant attendants is the chief bugler, or, as he is called in hussar Dutch, the “Stabstrompaytr”; mine was the prince of Trompaytrs, and his name was Wettstein. He was a Swiss, whose native language was a mixture of guttural French and mincing German. English was an impossible field to him. He had learned to say “yes” and “matches”; but not one other of our words could he ever lay his tongue to, except the universal “damn.” But for his bugle and his little gray mare, I should never have had occasion to know his worth. Music filled every pore of his Alpine soul, and his wonderful Swiss “Retreat” must ring to this day in the memory of every man of the regiment whose thoughts turn again to the romantic campaign of South Missouri. What with other buglers was a matter of routine training was with him an inspiration. All knew well enough the meaning of the commands that the company trumpets stammered or blared forth; but when they rang from Wettstein’s horn, they carried with them a vim and energy that secured their prompt execution; and his note in the wild Ozark Hills would mark the headquarters of the “Vierte Missouri” for miles around. From a hill-top, half a mile in advance of the marching command, I have turned the regiment into its camping-ground and dismounted it in perfect order by the melodious telegraphy of Wettstein’s brazen lips alone.
That other chief attribute of his, Klitschka, his little beast, stayed longer with me than his bugle did, and is hardly less identified with the varied reminiscences of my army life. I bought her, as a prize, with the original mount of the regiment, in Frémont’s time, and was mildly informed by that officer that I must be careful how I accepted many such animals from the contractor, though a few for the smaller men might answer. Asboth, Frémont’s chief of staff, with a scornful rolling up of his cataract of a mustache, and a shrug of his broad, thin shoulders, said, “Whyfor you buy such horses? What your bugler ride, it is not a horse, it is a cat.” His remark was not intended as a question, and it ended the conversation. Months after that, he eagerly begged for the nine-lived Klitschka for one of his orderlies; being refused him, she remained good to the end. She was an animal that defied every rule by which casual observers test the merit of a horse; but analytically considered she was nearly perfect. Better legs, a better body, and a better head, it is rare to see, than she had. But she lacked the arched neck and the proud step that she needed all the more because of her small size. By no means showy in figure or in action, it took a second look to see her perfect fitness for her work. Her color was iron-gray, and no iron could be tougher than she was; while her full, prominent eye and ample brain-room, and her quick paper-thin ear, told of courage and intelligence that made her invaluable throughout four years of hard and often dangerous service. Like many other ill-favored little people, she was very lovable, and Wettstein loved her like a woman. He would never hesitate to relax those strict rules of conduct by which German cavalrymen are supposed to govern themselves, if it was a question of stealing forage for Klitschka; and he was (amiable fellow!) never so happy as when, from a scanty supply in the country, he had taken enough oat-sheaves to bed her in and almost cover her up, while other horses of the command must go hungry; and was never so shaken in his regard for me as when I made him give up all but double rations for her.
Double rations she often earned, for Wettstein was a heavy youth, with a constitutional passion for baggage out of all proportion to his means of transportation. Mounted for the march, he was an odd sight. Little Klitschka’s back, with his immense rolls of blankets and clothing before and behind, looked like a dromedary’s. Planted between the humps, straight as a gun-barrel, the brightest of bugles suspended across his back by its tasselled yellow braid, slashed like a harlequin over the breast, his arms chevroned with gorgeous gold,—Wettstein, with his cap-front turned up so as to let the sun fall full on his frank blue eyes and his resolute blond mustache, was the very picture of a cavalry bugler in active campaign.
Smoking, gabbling, singing, rollicking, from morning until night, and still on until morning again if need be, he never lost spirit nor temper. He seemed to absorb sunshine enough during the day to keep every one bright around him all night. When at last his bugle had been stilled forever, we long missed the cheer of his indomitable gayety; wearying service became more irksome than while his bubbling mirth had tempered its dulness; and even little Klitschka, although she remained an example of steady pluck, had never so potent an influence as while he had put his own unfailing mettle into her heels. After she was bequeathed to me, she was always most useful, but never so gay and frisky as while she carried her own devoted groom. No day was too long for her and no road too heavy; her brisk trot knew no failing, but she refused ever again to form the personal attachment that had sealed her and Wettstein to each other.
The two of them together, like the fabled Centaur, made the complete creature. He with the hardened frame and bright nature of his Alpine race, and she with her veins full of the mustang blood of the Rocky Mountains, were fitted to each other as almost never were horse and rider before. Their performances were astonishing. In addition to a constant attendance on his commander (who, riding without baggage, and of no heavier person than Wettstein himself, sometimes fagged out three good horses between one morning and the next), the Trompaytr yet volunteered for all sorts of extra service,—carried messages over miles of bad road to the general’s camp, gave riding-lessons and music-lessons to the company buglers, and then—fear of the guard-house and fear of capture always unheeded—he never missed an opportunity for the most hazardous and most laborious foraging.
He was a thorough soldier,—always “for duty,” always cleanly, always handsome and cheery, and heedlessly brave. If detected in a fault (and he was, as I have hinted, an incorrigible forager), he took his punishment like a man, and stole milk for himself or fodder for Klitschka at the next convenient (or inconvenient) opportunity, with an imperturbability that no punishment could reach.
Once, when supplies were short, he sent me, from the guard-house where he had been confined for getting them, a dozen bundles of corn-blades for my horses; not as a bribe, but because he would not allow the incidents of discipline to disturb our friendly relations; and in the matter of fodder in scarce times he held me as a helpless pensioner, dependent on his bounty. When in arrest by my order, his “Pon chour, Herr Oberist,” was as cordial and happy as when he strolled free past my tent. Altogether, I never saw his like before or since. The good fortune to get such a bugle, such a soldier, and such a mount combined, comes but once in the lifetime of the luckiest officer. It was only his uncouth tongue that kept him from being pilfered from me by every general who had the power to “detail” him to his own headquarters.
So universal, by the way, was this petty vice of commanding officers, that one was never safe until he adopted the plan, in selecting a staff officer, of securing his promise to resign from the service, point-blank, if ordered to other duty, and more than one offended general has been made indignant by this policy. With Wettstein, I felt perfectly easy, for the average capacity of brigadier-generals stopped far short of the analysis of his dual jargon. Several tried him for a day, but they found that his comprehension was no better than his speech, and that his manifest ability was a sealed book to them. He always came home by nightfall with a chuckle, and “Le général versteht mich nicht. Je blase ‘marrrsch’ für ‘halt.’”
So it was that, for a couple of years, this trusty fellow trotted at my heels through rain and shine, by day and by night, with his face full of glee, and his well-filled canteen at the service of our little staff. Mud and mire, ditches and fences, were all one to him and Klitschka; and in Vix’s day they followed her lead over many a spot that the others had to take by flank movement.
Our work in Missouri was but little more than the work of subsistence. We were a part of an army too large for any Rebel force in that region to attack, and too unwieldy to pursue guerillas with much effect. But now and then we made a little scout that varied our otherwise dull lives; and at such times Wettstein always attached himself to the most dangerous patrolling party, and Klitschka was usually the first to bring back news of the trifling encounters.
At last, in February, 1863, when we had lain for a month in delicious idleness in the heart of a rich country, literally flowing with poultry and corn-fodder, I, being then in command of a division of cavalry, received an order from Davidson to select six hundred of the best-mounted of my men, and to attack Marmaduke, who was recruiting, ninety miles away, at Batesville on the White River in Arkansas. His main body, three thousand five hundred strong, lay in the “Oil-Trough Bottom,” on the other side of the river. A brigade of Western infantry was to march as far as Salem (thirty miles), and to support us if necessary; though we afterward found that at the only moment when we might have had grave occasion to depend on them, they were, with an inconsistency that was not the least attribute of our commanding officer, withdrawn without notice to us.
We were to go in light marching order, carrying only the necessary clothing, and rations of salt and coffee. Wettstein’s ideas of lightness differing from mine, I had to use some authority to rid poor Klitschka of saucepans, extra boots, and such trash; and after all, the rascal had, under the plea of a cold, requiring extra blankets, smuggled a neatly sewn sausage of corn, weighing some fifteen pounds, into one of his rolls. Eager men, too, whose horses were out of trim, had to be discarded, and the whole detail to be thoroughly overhauled. But the jovial anticipation of seeing Batesville once more—a New England village planted on a charming hillside in Arkansas, where we had sojourned with Curtis the summer before, and where we all had the pleasant acquaintance that even an enemy makes in a town from which the native men have long been gone, and only the women remain—made the work of preparation go smoothly, and long before dawn Wettstein’s bugle summoned the details from the several camps. There was a ringing joyousness in his call, that spoke of the cosey, roaring fire of a certain Batesville kitchen to which his bright face and his well-filled haversack had long ago made him welcome, and prospective feasting gave an added trill to his blast.
The little detachments trotted gayly into line, officers were assigned for special duty, temporary divisions were told off, and a working organization was soon completed. Before the sun was up, such a Ra, t’t’ta, t’t’ta, t’t’ta! as South Missouri had never heard before, broke the line by twos from the right, and we were off for a promising trip. Marmaduke we knew of old, and personal cowardice would have deterred no one from joining our party, for he could be reached from our stronger army only by a complete surprise; and in a country where every woman and child (white, I mean) was his friend and our enemy, a surprise, over ninety miles of bad roads, seemed out of the question. Indeed, before we had made a half of the distance, one of his flying scouts told a negro woman by the roadside, as he checked his run to water his horse, “There’s a hell’s-mint o’ Yanks a comin’ over the mountain, and I must git to Marmyjuke”; and to Marmaduke he “got,” half a day ahead of us, only to be laughed at for a coward who had been frightened by a foraging-party.