George W. Peck

“ Hunger was gnawing at my stomach, and the horse was gnawing at my legs, and I was gnawing at a hard tack which I had found in the saddle-bag. Every little while I would hear a noise, and my hair would raise my hat up, and it would seem to me as though the next minute a volley would be fired at me, and I shrunk down between the piles of baggage on my saddle to be protected from bullets. Suddenly the moon came out from behind a cloud and around a turn in the road a solitary horseman might have been seen coming towards me. I never have seen a horse that looked as high as that horse did. ”

“ I was never so glad of anything in my life. We stopped, and I examined my clothes, and they were perfectly dry. The excitement and warmth of the body had acted like a drying-room in a laundry. Then I laid down under a fence and went to sleep, and dreamed I was in hades, building a corduroy bridge across the Styx, and that the devil repremanded me for building it in the wrong place. When I awoke I was so stiff with rheumatism that I had to be helped up from under the fence, and they put me in an ambulance with a soldier who had his jaw shot off. ”

“ In war times, everybody steals. We are all thieves to a certain extent. The soldier will not go hungry if he can jay-hawk anything to eat. The officer will not go thirsty if he can capture whisky, nor will anybody walk if he can steal a horse. The higher a man gets the more he will steal. Shall we harbor unkind thoughts against this dead man for stealing a pair of boots, and honor a general who steals a thousand bales of cotton? (No! no! shouted the cooks and servants, while the officers looked as though they were sorry they attended the funeral.) ”

“ Every soldier filled his pockets and saddle bags with bonds and bills of large denominations. It was a poor soldier that could not count up his half a million dollars, but with all the money no man could buy a Christmas dinner. A dollar in greenbacks would buy more than all of the wagon loads of confederate currency captured that day. And yet the people of Montgomery looked upon the arrival of the Yankees much as they would the arrival of a pestilence. ”

“ Suppose a rebel was sick with ague, and I had quinine, would I see him shake himself out of his boots and not give him medicine? No, I would divide my last quinine powder with him. So would any soldier. If it was not treason to give one rebel a quinine powder, when he was sick, why should it be treason to take along enough for a whole lot of sick rebels? ”

“ Here was promotion with a vengeance. From the proud pinnacle from which I had soared, as chaplain's clerk, and colonel's orderly, I had dropped with one fell swoop to the rear end of my company, and nobody wanted me, because I had kicked against stealing hens in one instance, and burning buildings and tearing up railroads in the other. We rode all day, and at night laid down in the woods and slept, after eating the last of our rations. ”

“ I admired a man who could mingle business with pleasure, as he did when talking of possible death and worms in hard-tack, but death was never an interesting subject to me. I wanted to talk with the colonel more, and asked him if colonels often get killed, and if an orderly was exactly safe in his immediate vicinity, but he leaned against a tree and went to sleep, and I stood near, as wide awake as any man ever was. I wondered whose idea it was to send us fifty miles into the Confederacy to destroy provisions and railroads. ”

“ In that innocent looking bustle I feel that there is quinine for the million. Your heaving bosom contains, besides love for your friends and hatred of your enemies, a storehouse of useful medicines, contraband of war. In your stockings there is much that would interest the seeker after the truth, your corset that fits you so beautifully is liable to be full of revolver cartridges, while in your shoes there may be messages to the rebels. ”

“ When the body was brought out of the house, and the procession started down the street for the grave, a drum major, with a staff in his hand, came along by me, and I have always thought my horse took the drum major for the ring master of a circus, for he reared up and walked on his hind feet, and pawed the air, and made a spectacle of me that made me so ashamed that I wanted to be killed. I had the brigade colors in one hand, and had only one hand and two feet to cling on the horse by, and I must have looked like a cat climbing the roof of a whitewashed barn. ”

“ There were men in the line who had never been sick a day since they enlisted, big fellows that would fight all day, and stand picket all night, and who never knew what it was to have an ache. And it was amusing to see them appear to shake, and to act as though they had chills. Some of them could not keep from laughing, and it was evident that the doctor had his doubts about there being so many cases of chills, but he dosed out the quinine and whisky as long as there was a man who shook. As each man took his dose, he would show two expressions on his face. ”

“ It is thus that war makes men brutal, while in active service. They think of things and do things that they regret immediately after the firing ceases. The next ten minutes was the nearest thing to hell that I ever experienced, and it seemed as though my face must look like that of a fiend. I felt like one. The bugle sounded “forward,” and then there was an order to trot, and the revolver firing began, with the enemy so near that you could see their countenances, their eyes. Some of them were mounted, others were on foot, some on artillery caissons, and all full of fight. ”

“ The pancake had gone to work and digested itself right at once, as though there was no end of food, and my stomach yearned for something. I walked down by the quartermaster's wagons, about daylight, and there was a four-mule team, each with a nose bag on, with corn in it. The mules were eating corn, unconscious of a robber being near. At home, where I had lived on good fresh meat, bread, pie, everything that was good, nobody could have made me believe that I would steal corn from a government mule, but when I heard the mules eating that corn a demon possessed me, and I meditated robbery. ”

“ I halted the old man, and he stopped and told me that the Confederates had come into town from the East and driven our cavalry out on the other side, and I would be a prisoner in about five minutes, and he laughed, and the girls clapped their hands, and I felt as though my time had come. I had never killed an old man in my life, but I made up my mind to have my horse or kill him in his traces, so I drew my revolver and told him to let go the horse or he was a dead man. ”

“ The recruit-officer who, by his glided picture of the beauties of a soldier's life, induced me to enlist as a soldier, never mentioned anything that would lead me to believe that one of my duties would be to touch a match to another man's bales of cotton, or ditch a locomotive belonging to parties who never did me any harm, and who had a right to expect dividends from their railroad stock. If I had the money, that was represented in the stuff destroyed by our troops that day, I could run a daily newspaper for years, if it didn't have a subscriber or a patent medicine advertisement. ”

“ I wanted a soft job, with no fighting, as bad as any man ever did, and I told the chaplain that he need not fear as to my swearing again, as it was foreign to my nature, but I told him if he had been on the hurricane deck of a kicking mule for an hour, and seen comrades fall one by one, and bite the dust, and be carried on with marks of mule shoes all over their persons, he would swear, and I would bet on it. So it was arranged that I was to be the chaplain's clerk, and I moved my outfit over to his tent, and for the first time since I had been a soldier, I was perfectly happy. ”

“ We stopped in the woods, dismounted, and the boys would cut off a slice of fat pork and spread it on the hard tack and eat it. I had never supposed the government would subject its soldiers to such fare as that, and I wouldn't eat. I did not dare dismount, as there was no fence near that I could use to climb on to my horse, so I sat in the saddle and let the horse eat some grass, while I thought of home, and pie and cake, and what a condemned fool a man was to leave a comfortable home to go and put down anybody's rebellion. ”

“ I have listened to music, in my time, that has been pretty bad, and which has sent cold chills up my back, and caused me pain, but I never heard any bad music that seemed to grate on my nerves as did the noise my horse made in chewing the half of my last hard-tack, and the look of triumph the animal gave me was adding insult to injury. ”

“ The colonel asked me if I wanted anybody to defend me, and I told him I had a printing office once next door to a lawyer's office, and I knew a little about law, and would defend myself. The chaplain came soon, and began to tell his story, but I insisted, that he be sworn, and then he proceeded to tell his tale. He said that he was a God-fearing man, and meant to do right, and was willing to take his chances in the lottery of war, but when a man got him to ride a circus trick-horse, and bring upon his sacred calling the ribald laughter of the wicked, he felt that civilization was a failure. ”

“ I had seen him several times, at the colonel's headquarters, and he always seemed mad about something, and I had thought he was about the crossest looking man I ever saw, but if there was any truth in what the horse doctor had told me, he was easily reached if a man went at him right, and I resolved that if pure, unadulterated cheek and monumental gall would accomplish anything, I would have a furlough before night, for a homesicker man never lived than I was. ”

“ It was pretty sassy talk for a private soldier to indulge in towards a chaplain, but I was so disgusted to hear a man who should discountenance anything unsoldierly, talk so flippantly about taking from the women and children of the country what little they had to live on, because we had the power, their men folks being away in the army, that I got on my ear, as it were. ”

“ I had never thought that I was an expert at cards, but this triumph convinced me that there was more money to be made playing poker than in any other way. I figured up in my mind that if I could win a hundred dollars a night, and only played five nights a week, I could lay up two thousand dollars a month. To keep it up a year would make me rich, and if the war lasted a couple of years I could go home with money enough to buy out the best newspaper in Wisconsin. It is wonderful what a train of thought a young man's first success in gambling, or speculation, brings to him. ”

“ Another soldier had his big toe shot off by the accidental discharge of a carbine, and when the regiment stopped, and the colonel asked him if he wanted to stop there and wait for an ambulance to overtake him, he said, not if there is going to be a fight. I don't use a big toe much, anyway, and if there is a fight ahead, I want to be there, if I haven't got a toe left on my feet. The colonel smiled and said, all right, boy. I never saw fellows who were so anxious to fight, and I wondered how much money it would take to induce me to go into a fight when I was crippled up enough to be excused. ”

“ I wondered if I could hit a man with a bullet. Before the war I was quite a good shot with a shotgun, shooting into flocks of pigeons and ducks, and I thought what a good idea it would be if I could get that approaching rebel into a flock. ”

“ I have had the satisfaction of demonstrating to this truly good man that all is not gold that glitters. I have shown him that however spotted a man may be, if he rides a spotted circus horse, he will get there. I will leave it to the chaplain, now, if I was not justified in trading him that horse, after what he had done to me, and will ask him if he was not served perfectly right, and if in trading me that mule he did not do to others as he would have others do to him, and if so, if he does not think the others did it to him in great shape. ”

“ On the Confederate side, the generals who write articles invariably demonstrate that they everlastingly whipped their opponents, and drove them on in disorder. To read those articles it seems strange that the Union generals who won so many decisive battles, should not have ended the war much sooner than they did, and to read the accounts of battles won by the Confederates, and the demoralization that ensued in the ranks of their opponents, it seems marvellous that the Union army was victorious. ”

“ I can think of no position better calculated to ruin a young man than to commission him in a cavalry regiment. Now take my advice. Do not run in debt for a new uniform and a silver mounted sword, and don't put a stock of whisky and cigars into your tent, and keep open house, because when your whisky and cigars are gone, those who drank and smoked them will not think as much of you as before, and you will have formed habits that will illy prepare you for your work. ”