Mess

“ It is no wonder that the grease of one meal couldn't be cleaned from the mess kits for the next. For meals nearly overlapped each other. Organizations had to be fed in turn. In the corridors were processions of men, wondering if they could last until they got in, or if they could manage to get through if they did. And the odorous ghosts of many vanished meals pointed the transient nature of the one in progress.
For one on the edge, the atmosphere inside was nearly unbreatheable. The floor was awash with greasy, coffee-colored water. ”

“ Since most of the regiment couldn't go to town, families came down; and wives, mothers, sweethearts don't speed their nearest on to battle with dry eyes.
These final farewells were given as far as practicable a just proportion of the last rushed days. From morning to night the hostess houses were filled with women, soberly clothed, who knitted, and, for the most part, sat silently, glancing up each time a brown clad figure hurried in.
Towards the end they learned the way to the barracks, and sat in noisy, cluttered mess halls. At each opportunity their men would sit with them. ”

“ They returned to the camp in silence.
“I wish the girls were as tractable as you are, Annie,” he said an hour later, after having had a heated dispute with his daughters over some trifling disagreement. “They are as headstrong as mules.”
“Being girls, they take after you, John,” replied his wife, with a smile. “I’m afraid their husbands won’t find them as tractable as I have been.”
“Bring on more of your flapjacks and bacon, Miss Mary,” cried Scotty, as Mary poised a big pile of the steaming cakes over the heads of the hungry men who knelt at the mess-boxes. ”

“ When we clear the ship for action, you'll see 'most everything that's made of wood and movable heaved overboard. Even the men's ditty boxes will have to go, and then they'll be no richer than we are," he added; the ditty boxes being, let me add, the chests in which the tars keep their odds-and-ends of belongings.
Larry was tired, but scarcely hungry again when the call sounded for supper. Yet he and Striker joined the gunners' mess, to which they received a warm welcome, for Uncle Sam's Jack Tars are at all times a "hail-and-well-met" sort of men. ”

“ At other times, sleeping on our watch, or other instanced of remissness in duty, were not so slightly passed over; we were sometimes sentenced to sit on top the main-top-mast head, for two, four, and sometimes eight hours; at other times to sit on the weather cat-head, exposed to a cutting wind; and other similar punishments, depending on the humour or severity of the officer of the watch. In addition to the hardships and fatigues of duty, I began to find my situation in the mess grow daily more irksome. ”

“ Would I could foresee a term to our misery!—Who but yourself shall find a remedy for our misfortunes? Shall we delay, until time brings to light that which is now a secret, and the affront we have received entail on us a shame more intolerable than death itself? ”

“ Who can picture to himself without horror the dreadful moments which lingered as they passed, and seemed endless in the anxiety of suspense! There the poor fellow lay, in speechless agony, the fated witness of barbarity the most revolting. ”

“ Farther, in every course of life how many wracks there may be of torturing diseases, how many unhappy accidents may casually occur, how many unexpected disasters may arise, and what strange alterations may one moment produce? Not to mention such miseries as men are mutually the cause of, as poverty, imprisonment, slander, reproach, revenge, treachery, malice, cousenage, deceit, and so many more, as to reckon them all would be as puzzling arithmetic as the numbering of the sands. ”

“ Why am I called upon to do this, oh cruel, most cruel destiny? Cannot I fly from the horrid scene? Cannot I rather run a dagger into my heart? But no, 'tis plain my fate is ordained, sealed, fixed! and in vain I struggle,—I must fulfil the task appointed for me! ”

“ I trust that my purgations are now being performed, and are almost completed, for things appear to be drawing rapidly towards a crisis. The proverb says, when things are at their worst they must mend; but how bad that worst may be is beyond the reach of human knowledge. ”

“ In order to illustrate the nature of evils of this class, I may take two instances—cruelty and lasciviousness. That these are great intrinsic evils, we may, I think, easily assure ourselves, by imagining the state of a man, whose mind is solely occupied by either of these passions, in their worst form. ”

“ And it is equally clear that we experience every hour the effects of our fall and ruin. What, then, comes to us from all this chaos and wild confusion, in a voice of irresistible conviction, but the irrefragable truth of both those sides of humanity? ”

“ Their infernal greed and conceit, their confusion of mind, their slothfulness, their desire for discipline, their liking for monuments and display, their want of tact, all these defects needed but success for them to grow into active vice and plunge them into disaster. ”

“ What is there here, that man should wish to bear
A weight of years?—such rage to madness vext;
Wan, wasting, grief, and ever musing care,
Distressful pain, and poverty perplext?—
What is there here, but tombs and monuments—
Tyrants—who misery spread through every shore;
Wide wasting wars, the scourge of innocence ”

“ The petty crafts which make the pleader's art,
The dolts who sit in judgment, when the one
Who knows all must be silent; but you know not
The intolerable burden of suspense,
The hard and hateful gaze of hungry eyes
Which gloat upon your suffering. When doom came
It was well to know the worst, and hear no more
The half-forgotten horrors. But I think
The sense of common peril, common wrong,
Knits us in indissoluble unity,
Closer than years of converse. ”

“ In the records of these dark and turbulent times we see human nature presented to us—except in a very few instances—with but two aspects: luxury and indolence on the one hand, and cruelty allied with power on the other. ”

“ What enthusiasm has it witnessed, what efforts engendered, what illusions dispelled, what misery produced! How bitterly have nations, as well as individuals, within its short bounds, learned wisdom by suffering—how many lessons has experience taught—how much agony has wickedness brought in its train. ”

“ Such a heart is, at least to the limited ken of others, a chaos,—but a chaos from which he who imbosoms it, and who alone can understand it, calls up,—less like a god than a demon,—the evil elements, which create the lurid sphere his greatness. ”

“ With the clamour and horror yet in our ears of that raging eloquence in which the sufferer flings into the faces of prosperous men the very flame and hell-fire of his suffering, it needed no less than this to leave the mind exalted and reconciled. ”

“ In the abyss of evil into which I am plunged, I feel the blows reach me, without perceiving the hand by which they are directed or the means it employs. Shame and misfortune seem of themselves to fall upon me. ”

“ I enter upon a work, which consisting of many very singular instances, in its beginning appears hard and difficult, and in the process often sad and dreadful. For among manifold adversities, we shall not only meet with bitter revilings, scornful mockings, rude abuses, and bloody blows from the fool-hardy rabble; but also severe persecutions, hard imprisonments, grievous banishments, unmerciful spoil of goods, cruel whippings, cutting off of ears, smotherings in prisons, and also putting to death by the hands of the hangman, by order of the magistrates ”

“ There are times when, the elements being in unusual commotion, those who are bent on daring enterprises, or agitated by great thoughts, whether of good or evil, feel a mysterious sympathy with the tumult of nature, and are roused into corresponding violence. ”

“ I must be pardoned for giving these distressing details; but how otherwise can I depict the misery, moral and physical, which we are enduring? And with it all, I dare not venture to hope that we have reached the climax of our sufferings. ”

“ The violent shock between a mass of errors, useful to the few and powerful, and the truths so important to the many and the weak, with the fermentation of passions excited on that occasion, were productive of infinite evils to unhappy mortals. ”

“ What a hallowed and important crisis is that, when a glimpse of the intellectual or moral world breaks in upon the mind—what complicated reflections of regret and astonishment arise, while it strives to arrange and disclose its conceptions and ideas! ”

“ Now the pathetic emotion to which I have referred, as accompanying my contemplations of the violent struggles of so many excellent persons, is caused by the circumstance that, so far as I can judge, their labour is in vain. ”

“ What energies a difficult crisis called forth! How her spirit and self-possession bore up in the midst of danger and insult, and how she contrived to preserve her dignity even while compelled to make the most humiliating concessions! ”

“ The quiet and peaceably-disposed are wearied, worried, tormented, and almost stunned, by the ceaseless jarring produced by the confusion into which bad men have contrived to throw all the elements of social life. ”

“ I will interpret the grumblings, the murmurs, the tumults of crowds, the complaints ill-pronounced, and all these cries of beasts that, through ignorance and through suffering, man is forced to utter ... ”

“ Why so much domestic discord, ending in ruin—so many suicides? Why do men and women hurl themselves over the precipice of vice and deadly indulgences—when even a novice might easily see the inevitable? ”

“ Throughout the history of civilisation, wherever we can trace the feelings and ideas which have prevailed on this matter and the resultant conduct, the problem has existed, often to produce discord, conflict, and misery. ”

“ Here was begun an episode of that world-wide craze, which has run through all time, and almost every country, in which were enacted deeds of daring and suffering which add a new chapter to the history of human fearlessness and folly. ”

“ As if counting and hesitating what course to pursue for their relief, he paces up and down the grotesque mass, touching one, and gazing upon the haggard features of another, who looks up to see what it is that disturbs her. ”

“ A heavy, slow tread could be heard now and then, and now and then groans, and now and then words of protest and anger, bitter reproach, tremulous entreaty, fierce invective, and passionate lamentation. ”

“ They are reproached with raising, erecting, and heaping up, against the reigning social state, a mass of miseries, of griefs, of iniquities, of wrongs, of despairs, and of tearing from the lowest depths blocks of shadow in order therein to embattle themselves and to combat. ”

“ How frightful a thing it is to consider what—under an overruling hand and will omnipotent—may be the consequences of the smallest deed we do. The consequences immediate, proximate, future! How many lives, what an amount of misery, how much damnation, may depend upon a light word, an idle jest, a sportive trick! ”

“ Knowing that 'due decorum's' breach foulest disgrace will cause.
Those firm in mind will not slacken in their observance of the proprieties of life, knowing, as they do, the misery that flows from the transgression from them. ”

“ Never before had he been so agitated: fear, anger, or remorse had never ruffled the tenor of an existence which passed amidst rural avocations and unsophisticated pleasures,—knew nothing of intrigue, falsehood, or dissimulation—those parasitic plagues that follow the societies of men. ”

“ But go down to that miserable lane, where men mothered by Misery and sired by Crime, where the sons of Poverty and the daughters of Wretchedness, are huddled thick together, and you see this Demon of Intemperance in all his ugliness. ”

“ The powers of the coarse and commonplace will be arrayed against you—shafts of disdain and ridicule will be hurled at your tenderest feelings,—venomous lies and cruel calumnies will be circulated around you,—all to try and draw you from the circle of light into darkness and chaos. ”

“ Closing our Ears to the Complaints of others.—When we let our sky be clouded by the complaints and suffering of other mortals, who must bear the consequences of such gloom? No doubt those other mortals, in addition to all their other burdens! ”

“ Already malformation, which was to be seen in every crowd during the middle ages so that the crippled beggar was, as it were, an essential feature of the human spectacle, was becoming a strange thing in the world. ”

“ More misery and madness, more crime and unhappiness, more devilment and debauchery, vice, and treachery was crowded into that little space for a fortnight annually than might have occurred during an entire year in any country of Europe. ”

“ I repeat it, when I reflect on these irritating circumstances, unattended by one thing to soothe their feelings, or brighten the gloomy prospect, I cannot avoid apprehending that a train of evils will follow of a very serious and distressing nature. ”

“ Love betrayed, trust violated, aspiration misinterpreted, were the spiritual aspects; a divided household, entangling obligations, a probability of serious loss, were the material evils which accompanied them. ”

“ Before any outbreak or great commotion, from the disorganised condition of the moral body, there are observed signs of discontent, murmurings, and complaints, fierce looks and threats—these, at length, disappear, and people seem to be seized with a sudden apathy and indifference, which is as quickly cast aside, and all is rage, havoc, and confusion. ”

“ But in and out of these gates, for one-half of a thousand years, far more of corruption, cruelty, and darkness, has crept, or trailed, or strutted, than of the qualities fitly called by their high-sounding names. ”