The Army Mule, and Other War Sketches — Story, Setting & Ideas

These were the boys of '61, the raw recruits of the dawning conflict. With them went the memory of the girls they left behind them, many of whom were afterwards lost in the shuffle. But the memory, then infinitely sweet, was hourly refreshed by a contemplation of the tangible Testament and pin-cushion. With them went the toe-ache of tight boots, earthly, sensual, devilish, and a flushed consciousness, even when drilling in the awkward squad, that the eyes of the universe were upon them. With them also, or following them, or mayhap meeting them in the dreamy borderland of Kentucky or Missouri to which he is fortuitously indigenous, went the harmless, necessary Mule.

He was a child of wrath, with a throat for melody spacious as the funnel of a cyclone; with dexter and sinister ears of renown; with eyes foxy but sad, and saddest when he sang. He carried with him the appetite of a Chippewa maiden clad in cavalry trowsers and a tentfly; also an inherited capacity to stand indefinitely on one foot and kick vehemently with all the others. He was reliable as grandfather's clock and prompt as the railway mail service. He was under a recognizance to support the constitution of the United States, and stamp out the Confederacy to the best of his ability.

He was a raw recruit likewise. When men were beating the wrong way their plowshares into swords, he was out of a job on a dull labor market and could the better be spared. How much of the issues and principles at stake his comprehensive intelligence intelligently comprehended will perhaps never be known. He did not attend crowded war meetings in country school-houses and waste his rhetoric on the fetid air. It may fairly be surmised, however, that he knew better than any northern croaker the futility of trying to repossess our surrendered fortresses with writs of replevin; knew better than any southern fire-eater the folly of attempting to build up a republic with a live negro wriggling under the corner-stone; knew and would gladly have proclaimed, that no lapse of slip-shod years, no hoariness of unchallenged usage, no deftest hammerings of forensic sophistry can ever fashion a vested right out of a ragged wrong.

At all events, whether wittingly or willingly or neither, he became as potent a factor in the situation militant as when Samson slew a thousand Philistines with the jawbone of one of his remote ancestors. He wheeled into line useful, ubiquitous, proud as a deceased Connemarran with a solid silver door-plate on his pearl-plush casket, blazoning his immortal virtues--also quite numerous. A total of 450,000 mules and 650,000 horses served in the various armies. In 1864, the forces actually in the field required for artillery, cavalry and trains one-half as many animals as there were soldiers.

As a recruit, the Mule soon became an object of usurious rates of interest and concentrated curiosity. He was a drawing card, a veritable bargain counter or church scandal in his tractile powers. His fame had preceded him, and his name was a potent talisman for conjuring ecstatic assemblages. His name pronounced, the sensation seekers gathered, as in the manipulation of complicated governmental machinery congress touches the button, and the department clerks do the rest, subject to approval of the salary and allowance division. Haled in, unhaltered, from amid the frisking bluegrass felicities of his pasture primeval, with his tail full of burs and his gaze full of vinegar, the details of his primary instruction were, as a rule, full of activity and enthusiasm.

In mischievous impulse he is fertile as those human scalps which raise hair enough for home consumption, and send a surplus to market twice a year. His venturesome instructors are wise if they make their testamentary dispositions in advance, and provide abundant bandages and plasters, with blank coupons or certified checks attached to provide for extra dividends. One out-thrust of his right front foot has been known to reduce a newly uniformed soldier to a state of nudity from his napless crown to his callous sole, with incidental contusions of flesh and abrasions of cuticle too hideous for contemplation.

Enmeshed in surreptitious cordage, the speechless, untamed quadruped is thrown to the cold, cold ground, where, for a time, he writhes and struggles, a _cheveaux-de-frise_ of black, gyrating hoofs. If he gets loose, he darts through an ambulance or climbs a tree without compunction. But he seldom gets loose. When his first wild anger has been measurably spent and the mercury in him has gone down to the bulb, five or six bow-legged hirelings of the quartermaster's bureau, with waffle-iron cast of countenance born of small-pox, simultaneously proceed to administer disjointed sections of harness to the exterior of that noble form.