George E. Waring

“ It was the glorious day of her life, and, as we dismounted at the Jersey ferry, she was trembling still with the delightful excitement.
At Washington we were encamped east of the Capitol, and for a month were busy in getting settled in the new harness. Mr. Lincoln used to drive out sometimes to our evening drill, and he always had a pleasant word—as he always had for every one, and as every one had for her—for my charming thoroughbred, who had made herself perfectly at home with the troops, and enjoyed every display of the marvellous raiment of the regiment. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Such a race of handsome, hale, straight-limbed, honest, and simple-hearted men can nowhere else be found as in the wide class that passes as much of every winter as is possible in regular fox-hunting; and to make an application of their example, we could well afford to give over many of our fertile fields to ruthless destruction, and many of our fertile hours to the most senseless sport, if it would only replace our dyspeptic stomachs, sallow cheeks, stooping shoulders, and restless eagerness with the hale and hearty and easy-going life and energy of our English cousins. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ My leader cleared the bars, but his horse’s hind feet slipped on the bank of the ditch, and he fell backwards with an ugly kind of sprawl that I had no time to examine, for Dick took the leap easily and soon brought me into a field where, on a little hillock, and quite alone, stood the huntsman, dismounted, holding the dead fox high in his left hand, while with his long-leashed hunting-crop he kept the hungry and howling pack at bay. ”

“ As we sat chatting and lighting our cigars, “Tally-ho!” was called from the other side of the cover, and we splashed through a muddy cart-road and out into the open just as the hounds were well away. Now was a ride for dear life. Every one had on all the speed the heavy ground would allow. In front of us was a “bullfinch” (a neglected hedge, out of which strong thorny shoots of several years’ growth have run up ten or twelve feet above it) . I had often heard of bullfinches, and no hunting experience could be complete without taking one. ”

“ She conceived a new affection for me from the moment when she saw me bedecked with the dazzling bloom that preceded the serious fruitage of the early New York volunteer organizations.
At last the thrilling day came. Broadway was alive from end to end with flags and white cambric and sad faces. Another thousand were going to the war. With Swiss bugle-march and chanted Marseillaise, we made our solemn way through the grave and anxious throng. To us it was naturally a day of sore trial; but with brilliant, happy Vixen it was far different ”

“ Then, with his inimitable naïveté, he not only expressed, but demonstrated, in every look and gesture, more delight in watching our movements than he had felt in his own riding. “Praise a horseman for his horsemanship, and he will ride to the Devil.” Gluckmansklegge (I did not suspect him of a desire for promotion) pointed to a strong rail-fence near by, and suggested that the combination of man and horse for that sort of thing was unusual. Whether it was a banter or a compliment, it would have been impossible for any man who properly esteemed himself and his riding to stop to consider. ”

“ Perhaps for the last time in my life I was taking the breath of an English twilight,—sweetest to those whose childhood and youth have fed on the rhyme and tale the green old land has sent to her world-wide brood, and who come, in riper life, to find the fancies of early years warm and living on every side, in hedge and field, in cowslip and primrose, in nightingale and lark. ”

“ 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. ”

“ His life had been passed in the profession, and he had only left his position of major in a Bavarian Uhlan regiment to draw his sabre in defence of “die Freiheit,” in America, as senior captain of the Fourth Missouri Cavalry. He was an officer of Asboth’s selection, and had many of that veteran’s qualities. Tall, thin, of elegant figure, as perfect a horseman as good natural advantages and good training could make, and near-sighted, as a German cavalry officer must be, he was as natty a fellow as ever wore an eye-glass and a blond mustache. ”

“ The few villages on our way were neither interesting nor pleasant, but the thatched farm-houses and cottages, and the wonderful ivy, and the charming fields and hedges were all that could have been asked.
And then the roadsides! and the stiles and the foot-paths, and the look of age and the richness of the well-kept farms; and again and everywhere the ivy clinging fast to each naked thing, and clothing it with luxuriant beauty!
There is in all our hearts an inherited chord that thrills in the presence of this dear old home of our race. ”

“ A stranger participating in the sport need only be guided by common modesty and common-sense. However good a horseman he may be, he cannot make a sensation among the old stagers of the hunting-field. Probably he will get no commendation of any sort. If he does, it will be for keeping out of the way of others,—taking always the easiest and safest road that will bring him well up with the hounds, not flinching when a desperate leap must be taken, and following (at a respectful distance) a good leader, rather than trying to take the lead himself. ”

“ At this point, and at this stage of the convivial cheer, they bring in the charge at Balaklava, and other evidences that the noble sport, which is the glory of old England, breeds a race of men whose invincible daring always has won and always shall win her honor in the field;—and Long live the Queen, and Here’s a health to the Handley Cross Hunt, and Confusion to the mean and niggardly spirit that is filling the country with wire fences and that would do away with the noble sport which is the glory of old England! ”

“ On the road I fell in with straggling groups of horsemen, in red coats and black coats, leather breeches and cords, white tops and black; all neat and jaunty, and all wearing the canonical stove-pipe hat. My little mare was brisk, and I had no hard riding to save her for, so I passed a dozen or more of the party, getting from each one some form or other of pleasant recognition, and finally from a handsome young fellow on a very spicy mount, “Excuse me, are you going to Brinklow? You must turn to the right.” ”

“ I saw one farmer, in an excited manner, open the gates of his kitchen-garden and turn the hounds and twenty horsemen through it as the shortest way to where he had seen the fox go; his womenfolk eagerly calling “Tally-ho!” to others who were going wrong. I have never seen a railroad train stopped because of the conductor’s interest in a passing hunt, but I fancy that is the only thing in England that does not stop when the all-absorbing interest is once awakened. ”

“ But let a non-riding reformer get up after the annual dinner of the local Agricultural Association and suggest that the rights of tenant-farmers have long enough lain at the mercy of their landlord and his fox-hunting friends, with the rabble of idle sports and ruthless ne’er-do-weels who follow at their heels, and that it is time for them to assert themselves and try to secure the prohibition of a costly pastime, which leads to no good practical result, and the burdens of which fall so heavily on the producing classes,—and then see how his brother farmers will second his efforts. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Photography and description may, in a measure, supply the place of travel; but he who would realize the most thrilling intensity of eager horsemanship must stand in a hedge-bound English lane, and see with his own eyes, and for the first time in his life, a hundred gayly dressed and splendidly mounted fox-hunters flashing at full speed across his path ”

“ 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. ”

“ They soon found a fox, drove him to the open, and followed him out of the wood with a whimpering sort of cry which was disappointing after the notion that the “full cry” of the books had given, and which is heard in the very different fox-hunting of our Southern woods. The run lay up a steepish hill, several fields wide and across an open country. One bold rider (not a light one) , mounted on a staving black horse, went to the right of the cover, and made a splendid leap up hill, over a stiff-looking hedge, and landed at the tail of the pack. ”

“ At nine o’clock, after Klitschka had fed and the patrols had come in, we set out on our march. It was still snowing hard, and even the dead men that marked Rosa’s recent ride were fast being shrouded in purest white. One of them Wettstein pointed out as the man with whom he had crossed sabres, and he asked permission to stay with the party detailed to bury him, for he had been a “braff homme.” With his tender sympathy for friend or foe, he was a truer mourner than a dead soldier often gets from the ranks of his enemy. ”

“ The Park afforded good leaping in those days. Some of the fences were still standing around the abandoned gardens, and new ditches and old brooks were plenty. Vixen gave me lessons in fencing which a few years later, in time of graver need, stood me in good stead. She weighed less than four times the weight that she carried; yet she cleared a four-foot fence with apparent ease, and once, in a moment of excitement, she carried me over a brook, with a clear leap of twenty-six feet, measured from the taking-off to the landing.
Her feats of endurance were equal to her feats of strength. ”

“ And then for two days we pressed forward, in company with the whole column, through the rough, rocky, and wooded country, reaching Okolona only at nightfall.
Here we struck the marvellous prairie region of Northeastern Mississippi, literally a land flowing with milk and honey. An interminable, fertile, rolling prairie lay before us in every direction. The stern rule of the Confederacy had compelled the planters to offset every small field of cotton with a wide area of corn, until the region had become known as the granary of the Southern army. ”

“ CAMPAIGNING WITH MAX.
Union City was not a city at all; it was hardly a village, and “Disunion” would have been its fairer designation. It lay in the woods at the crossing of two railroads, one pointing toward Mobile and one toward Memphis, but neither leading anywhere. There was a tradition that trains had once been run upon each, but many bridges had had to be rebuilt to make the short line to Columbus passable, and the rest was ruin; for Forrest had been there with his cavalry. ”

“ I had not laid down my life in the war, but during its wonderful four years I had laid down, so completely, the ways of life of a sober and industrious citizen, and had soaked my whole nature so full of the subtile ether of idleness and vagabondism, that it seemed as easy and as natural to become the Aladdin I might have dreamed myself to be as the delver I had really been. ”

“ Dinner over, wander away through the tortuous, dim passage that leads to the sombre hall where alone in English inns the twin crimes of billiards and smoking are permitted, and, while writhing under the furtive glances of the staid and middle-aged East-Indian who evidently knows you for an American, and who is your only companion, decide, with your nation’s ability to reach conclusions without premises, whether it shall be Pytchley or Atherstone. ”

“ There was a great firebrand scar on the flat of each shoulder, where he had been fired for a cough,—so said Gluckmansklegge;—others intimated that this effaced a U. S. brand; but, except this, not a sign of a blemish. In form, action, style, color (chestnut) , and training he was unexceptionably good, and might well excite the envy of all good horsemen who saw him under the saddle. Knowing him so well, I went rather eagerly to the picket-line to refresh myself with the added sensation that the actual ownership of such a horse must give. ”

“ At Union City the headquarters’ horses were stabled under a capital shed, close at hand, and all that master’s eye and servant’s labor could accomplish for their care and improvement was lavished upon them; so that, during our long months’ stay, we were among the best-mounted men in the Western army. Our pleasure-riding and our work lay through swampy wood-roads, over obstructions of every sort, and across the occasional grass farms, with their neglected rail-fences. ”

“ No rigid history hampers the fancy, and the strolling lover of the by-ways and roadsides of our dear Mother England may let his imagination run with flowing rein, sweeping away the hayricks and marigold beds, and calling back the peacocks and bagwigs of the halcyon days. ”

“ The open country offered good fighting ground, and gave to our better drilled and more completely organized forces a decided advantage, even without our great odds in artillery. There lay before us a fair opportunity for dispersing the most successful body of cavalry in the Rebel service; and, could we effect a junction with Sherman, we should enable him to divide the Confederacy from Vicksburg to Atlanta. One of the most brilliant and damaging campaigns of the war seemed ready to open. Its key lay in our successful engagement, on a fair field, with an inferior force. ”

“ I had before, in drill-ground charges, seen old soldiers and experienced officers jump down and run away from a fence on which they were sitting to watch the advance of charging cavalry which they knew must wheel before coming within five rods of them; but I had never supposed that hot-blooded soldiers, in the full excitement of a successful attack, could be unnerved and turned by the roar and thundering oncoming of a regiment that could by no possibility reach them. Our first setting out had driven back a thin skirmish-line which had to cross the fence under high speed ”

“ 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 ”

“ By six o’clock we were in good trim for dinner, and after dinner for a long, cosey talk over the events of the day, and horses and fox-hunting in general. My own interest in the sport is confined mainly to its equestrian side, and I am not able to give much information as to its details. Any stranger must be impressed with the firm hold it has on the affections of the people, and with the little public sympathy that is shown for the rare attempts that are made to restrict its rights. ”