no humour to put up with insubordination. So he yielded
the point and called a council of war to consist of himself
and the three other officers ; but the privates made such a
fuss about being left out, that we had to allow them to
remain, for they were already present, and doing the most
of the talking too. The question was, which way to
retreat ; but all were so flurried that nobody seemed to have
even a guess to offer. Except Lyman. He explained in a
few calm words, that inasmuch as the enemy were approach
ing from over Hyde s prairie, our course was simple : all we
had to do was not to retreat toward him ; any other direc
tion would answer our needs perfectly. Everybody saw in
a moment how true this was, and how wise ; so Lyman got
a great many compliments. It was now decided that we
should fall back on Mason s farm.
It was after dark by this time, and as we could not know
how soon the enemy might arrive, it did not seem best to
try to take the horses and things with us ; so we only took
the guns and ammunition, and started at once. The route
was very rough and hilly and rocky, and presently the night
grew very black and rain began to fall ; so we had a trouble
some time of it, struggling and stumbling along in the
dark ; and soon some person slipped and fell, and then the
next person behind stumbled over him and fell, and so did
360 MY MILITARY CAMPAIGN
the rest, one after the other ; and then Bowers came with
the keg of powder in his arms, whilst the command were
all mixed together, arms and legs, on the muddy slope ; and
so he fell, of course, with the keg, and this started the whole
detachment down the hill in a body, and they landed in the
brook at the bottom in a pile, and each that was undermost
pulling the hair and scratching and biting those that were
on top of him ; and those that were being scratched and
bitten, scratching and biting the rest in their turn, and all
saying they would die before they would ever go to war
again if they ever got out of this brook this time, and the
invader might rot for all they cared, and the country along
with him and all such talk as that, which was dismal to
hear and take part in, in such smothered, low voices, and
such a grisly dark place and so wet, and the enemy maybe
coming any moment.
The keg of powder was lost, and the guns too ; so the
growling and complaining continued straight along whilst
the brigade pawed around the pasty hillside and slopped
around in the brook hunting for these things ; consequently
we lost considerable time at this ; and then we heard a sound,
and held our breath and listened, and it seemed to be the
enemy coming, though it could have been a cow, for it had
a cough like a cow ; but we did not wait, but left a couple
of guns behind and struck out for Mason s again as briskly
as we could scramble along in the dark. But we got lost
presently among the rugged little ravines, and wasted a deal
of time finding the way again, so it was after nine when we
reached Mason s stile at last ; and then before we could open
our mouths to give the countersign, several dogs came
bounding over the fence, with great riot and noise, and each
of them took a soldier by the slack of his trousers and began
to back away with him. We could not shoot the dogs
MY MILITARY CAMPAIGN 361
without endangering the persons they were attached to ; so
we had to look on, helpless, at what was perhaps the most
mortifying spectacle of the civil war. There was light
enough, and to spare, for the Masons had now run out on
the porch with candles in their hands. The old man and
his son came and undid the dogs without difficulty, all but
Bowers s ; but they couldn t undo his dog, they didn t know
his combination ; he was of the bull kind, and seemed to be
set with a Yale time-lock ; but they got him loose at last
with some scalding water, of which Bowers got his share
and returned thanks. Peterson Dunlap afterwards made up
a fine name for this engagement, and also for the night
march which preceded it, but both have long ago faded out
of my memory.
We now went into the house, and they began to ask us
a world of questions, whereby it presently came out that we
did not know anything concerning who or what we were
running from ; so the old gentleman made himself very
frank, and said we were a curious breed of soldiers, and
guessed we could be depended on to end up the war in time,
because no Government could stand the expense of the shoe-
leather we should cost it trying to follow us around.
4 Marion Rangers \ good name, b gosh ! said he. And
wanted to know why we hadn t had a picket-guard at the
place where the road entered the prairie, and why we hadn t
sent out a scouting party to spy out the enemy and bring
us an account of his strength, and so on, before jumping up
and stampeding out of a strong position upon a mere vague
rumour and so on, and so forth, till he made us all feel
shabbier than the dogs had done, and not half so enthusiasti
cally welcome. So we went to bed shamed and low-spirited ;
except Stevens. Soon Stevens began to devise a garment
for Bowers which could be made to automatically display
362 MY MILITARY CAMPAIGN
his battle-scars to the grateful, or conceal them from the
envious, according to his occasions ; but Bowers was in no
humour for this, so there was a fight, and when it was over
Stevens had some battle-scars of his own to think about.
Then we got a little sleep. But after all we had gone
through, our activities were not over for the night ; for
about two o clock in the morning we heard a shout of
warning from down the lane, accompanied by a chorus
from all the dogs, and in a moment everybody was up and
flying around to find out what the alarm was about. The
alarmist was a horseman who gave notice that a detach
ment of Union soldiers was on its way from Hannibal with
orders to capture and hang any bands like ours which it
could find, and said we had no time to lose. Farmer
Mason was in a flurry this time, himself. He hurried us
out of the house with all haste, and sent one of his negroes
with us to show us where to hide ourselves and our tell-tale
guns among the ravines half a mile away. It was raining
heavily.
We struck down the lane, then across some rocky
pasture-land which offered good advantages for stumbling ;
consequently we were down in the mud most of the
time, and every time a man went down he blackguarded
the war, and the people that started it, and everybody
connected with it, and gave himself the master dose of all
for being so foolish as to go into it. At last we reached
the wooded mouth of a ravine, and there we huddled
ourselves under the streaming trees, and sent the negro
back home. It was a dismal and heart-breaking time.
We were like to be drowned with the rain, deafened with
the howling wind and the booming thunder, and blinded
by the lightning. It was indeed a wild night. The
drenching we were getting was misery enough, but a
MY MILITARY CAMPAIGN 363
deeper misery still was the reflection that the halter might
end us before we were a day older. A death of this
shameful sort had not occurred to us as being among the
possibilities of war. It took the romance all out of the
campaign, and turned our dreams of glory into a repulsive
nightmare. As for doubting that so barbarous an order
had been given, not one of us did that.
The long night wore itself out at last, and then the
negro came to us with the news that the alarm had
manifestly been a false one, and that breakfast would soon
be ready. Straightway we were light-hearted again, and
the world was bright, and life as full of hope and promise
as ever for we were young then. How long ago that
was ! Twenty-four years.
The mongrel child of philology named the night s
refuge Camp Devastation, and no soul objected. The
Masons gave us a Missouri country breakfast, in Missourian
abundance, and we needed it : hot biscuits ; hot wheat
bread prettily criss-crossed in a lattice pattern on top ;
hot corn pone ; fried chicken ; bacon, coffee, eggs, milk,
buttermilk, etc. ; and the world may be confidently
challenged to furnish the equal to such a breakfast, as it is
cooked in the South.
We stayed several days at Mason s ; and after all these
years the memory of the dulness, the stillness and lifeless-
ness of that slumberous farm-house still oppresses my spirit as
with a sense of the presence of death and mourning.
There was nothing to do, nothing to think about ; there
was no interest in life. The male part of the household
were away in the fields all day, the women were busy and
out of our sight ; there was no sound but the plaintive wailing
of a spinning-wheel, forever moaning out from some distant
room the most lonesome sound in nature, a sound steeped
364 MY MILITARY CAMPAIGN
and sodden with homesickness and the emptiness of life.
The family went to bed about dark every night, and as we
were not invited to intrude any new customs, we naturally
followed theirs. Those nights were a hundred years long
to youths accustomed to being up till twelve. We lay
awake and miserable till that hour every time, and grew
old and decrepit waiting through the still eternities for the
clock-strikes. This was no place for town boys. So at
last it was with something very like joy that we received
news that the enemy were on our track again. With a
new birth of the old warrior spirit, we sprang to our places
in line of battle and fell back on Camp Rails.
Captain Lyman had taken a hint from Mason s talk,
and he now gave orders that our camp should be guarded
against surprise by the posting of pickets. I was ordered
to place a picket at the forks of the road in Hyde s prairie.
Night shut down black and threatening. I told Sergeant
Bowers to go out to that place and stay till midnight ; and,
just as I was expecting, he said he wouldn t do it. I tried
to get others to go, but all refused. Some excused them
selves on account of the weather ; but the rest were frank
enough to say they wouldn t go in any kind of weather.
This kind of thing sounds odd now, and impossible, but
there was no surprise in it at the time. On the contrary,
it seemed a perfectly natural thing to do. There were
scores of little camps scattered over Missouri where the same
thing was happening. These camps were composed of
young men who had been born and reared to a sturdy
independence, and who did not know what it meant to be
ordered around by Tom, Dick, and Harry, whom they had
known familiarly all their lives, in the village or on the farm.
It is quite within the probabilities that this same thing was
happening all over the South, James Redpath recognised
MY MILITARY CAMPAIGN 365
the justice of this assumption, and furnished the following
instance in support of it. During a short stay in East
Tennessee he was in a citizen colonel s tent one day, talking,
when a big private appeared at the door, and without salute
or other circumlocution said to the colonel :
1 Say, Jim, I m a-goin home for a few days.
What for ?
Well, I hain t b en there for a right smart while, and
I d like to see how things is comin on.
4 How long are you going to be gone ?
Bout two weeks.
Well don t be gone longer than that ; and get back
sooner if you can.
That was all, and the citizen officer resumed his conver
sation where the private had broken it off. This was in
the first months of the war, of course. The camps in our
part of Missouri were under Brigadier-General Thomas H.
Harris. He was a townsman of ours, a first-rate fellow, and
well liked ; but we had all familiarly known him as the sole
and modest-salaried operator in our telegraph office, where
he had to send about one dispatch a week in ordinary times,
and two when there was a rush of business ; consequently,
when he appeared in our midst one day, on the wing, and
delivered a military command of some sort, in a large
military fashion, nobody was surprised at the response
which he got from the assembled soldiery :
Oh, now, what ll you take to dont, Tom Harris !
It was quite the natural thing. One might justly imagine
that we were hopeless material for war. And so we seemed,
in our ignorant state ; but there were those among us who
afterward learned the grim trade ; learned to obey like
machines ; became valuable soldiers ; fought all through
the war, and came out at the end with excellent records.
366 MY MILITARY CAMPAIGN
One of the very boys who refused to go out on picket duty
that night, and called me an ass for thinking he would
expose himself to danger in such a foolhardy way, had become
distinguished for intrepidity before he was a year older.
I did secure my picket that night not by authority,
but by diplomacy. I got Bowers to go, by agreeing to
exchange ranks with him for the time being, and go
along and stand the watch with him as his subordinate.
We stayed out there a couple of dreary hours in the pitchy
darkness and the rain, with nothing to modify the dreariness
but Bowers s monotonous growlings at the war and the
weather ; then we began to nod, and presently found it next
to impossible to stay in the saddle ; so we gave up the
tedious job, and went back to the camp without waiting for
the relief guard. We rode into camp without interruption
or objection from anybody, and the enemy could have done
the same, for there were no sentries. Everybody was asleep ;
at midnight there was nobody to send out another picket,
so none was sent. We never tried to establish a watch at
night again, as far as I remember, but we generally kept
a picket out in the daytime.
In that camp the whole command slept on the corn in
the big corn-crib ; and there was usually a general row
before morning, for the place was full of rats, and they
would scramble over the boys bodies and faces, annoying
and irritating everybody ; and now and then they would
bite some one s toe, and the person who owned the toe
would start up and magnify his English and begin to throw
corn in the dark. The ears were half as heavy as bricks,
and when they struck they hurt. The persons struck
would respond, and inside of five minutes every man would
be locked in a death-grip with his neighbour. There was
a grievous deal of blood shed in the corn-crib, but this was
MY MILITARY CAMPAIGN 367
all that was spilt while I was in the war. No, that is not
quite true. But for one circumstance it would have been
all. I will come to that now.
Our scares were frequent. Every few days rumours
would come that the enemy were approaching. In these
cases we always fell back on some other camp of ours ; we
never stayed where we were. But the rumours always
turned out to be false ; so at last even we beran to OTOW
* O O
indifferent to them. One night a negro was sent to our
corn-crib with the same old warning : the enemy was
hovering in our neighbourhood. We all said let him hover.
o o
We resolved to stay still and be comfortable. It was a fine
warlike resolution, and no doubt we all felt the stir of it in
our veins for a moment. We had been having a very
jolly time, that was full of horse-play and school-boy
hilarity ; but that cooled down now, and presently the
fast-waning fire of forced jokes and forced laughs died out
altogether, and the company became silent. Silent and
nervous. And soon uneasy worried apprehensive. We
had said we would stay, and we were committed. We
could have been persuaded to go, but there was nobody
brave enough to suggest it. An almost noiseless move
ment presently began in the dark, by a general but
unvoiced impulse. When the movement was completed,
each man knew that he was not the only person who had
crept to the front wall and had his eye at a crack between
the logs. No, we were all there ; all there with our hearts
in our throats, and staring out toward the sugar-troughs
where the forest foot-path came through. It was late, and
there was a deep woodsy stillness everywhere. There was
a veiled moonlight, which was only just strong enough to
enable us to mark the general shape of objects. Presently
a muffled sound caught our ears, and we recognised it as
368 MY MILITARY CAMPAIGN
the hoof-beats of a horse or horses. And right away a
figure appeared in the forest path ; it could have been made
of smoke, its mass had so little sharpness of outline. It was
a man on horseback ; and it seemed to me that there were
others behind him. I got hold of a gun in the dark, and
pushed it through a crack between the logs, hardly know
ing what I was doing, I was so dazed with fright. Some
body said * Fire ! I pulled the trigger. I seemed to see a
hundred flashes and hear a hundred reports, then I saw the
man fall down out of the saddle. My first feeling was of
surprised gratification ; my first impulse was an apprentice-
sportsman s impulse to run and pick up his game. Some
body said, hardly audibly, Good we ve got him ! wait
for the rest. But the rest did not come. We waited
listened still no more came. There was not a sound, not
the whisper of a leaf; just perfect stillness; an uncanny
kind of stillness, which was all the more uncanny on
account of the damp, earthy, late-night smells now rising
and pervading it. Then, wondering, we crept stealthily
out, and approached the man. When we got to him the
moon revealed him distinctly. He was lying on his back,
with his arms abroad ; his mouth was open and his chest
heaving with long gasps, and his white shirt-front was all
splashed with blood. The thought shot through me that
I was a murderer ; that I had killed a man a man who
had never done me any harm. That was the coldest
sensation that ever went through my marrow. I was down
by him in a moment, helplessly stroking his forehead ; and
I would have given anything then my own life freely to
make him again what he had been five minutes before.
And all the boys seemed to be feeling in the same way ;
they hung over him, full of pitying interest, and tried all
they could to help him, and said all sorts of regretful
MY MILITARY CAMPAIGN 369
tilings. They had forgotten all about the enemy ; they
thought only of this one forlorn unit of the foe. Once my
imagination persuaded me that the dying man gave me a
reproachful look out of his shadowy eyes, and it seemed to
me that I would rather he had stabbed me than done that.
He muttered and mumbled like a dreamer in his sleep,
about his wife and his child ; and I thought with a new de
spair, This thing that I have done does not end with him ;
it falls upon them too, and they never did me any harm, any
more than he.
In a little while the man was dead. He was killed in
war ; killed in fair and legitimate war ; killed in battle, as
you may say ; and yet he was as sincerely mourned by the
opposing force as if he had been their brother. The boys
stood there a half hour sorrowing over him, and recalling the
details of the tragedy, and wondering who he might be, and
if he were a spy, and saying that if it were to do over again
they would not hurt him unless he attacked them first. It
soon came out that mine was not the only shot fired ; there
were five others a division of the guilt which was a grateful
relief to me, since it in some degree lightened and diminished
the burden I was carrying. There were six shots fired at
once ; but I was not in my right mind at the time, and my
heated imagination had magnified my one shot into a volley.
The man was not in uniform, and was not armed. He
was a stranger in the country ; that was all we ever found
out about him. The thought of him got to preying upon
me every night ; I could not get rid of it. I could not
drive it away, the taking of that unoffending life seemed
such a wanton thing. And it seemed an epitome of war ;
that all war must be just that the killing of strangers against
whom you feel no personal animosity ; strangers whom, in
other circumstances, you would help if you found them in
B B
370 MY MILITARY CAMPAIGN
trouble, and who would help you if you needed it. My
campaign was spoiled. It seemed to me that I was not
rightly equipped for this awful business ; that war was
intended for men, and I for a child s nurse. I resolved to
retire from this avocation of sham soldiership while I could
save some remnant of my self-respect. These morbid
thoughts clung to me against reason ; for at bottom I did
not believe I had touched that man. The law of probabilities
decreed me guiltless of his blood ; for in all my small experi
ence with guns I had never hit anything I had tried to hit,
and I knew I had done my best to hit him. Yet there was
no solace in the thought. Against a diseased imagination,
demonstration goes for nothing.
The rest of my war experience was of a piece with what
I have already told of it. We kept monotonously falling
back upon one camp or another, and eating up the country.
I marvel now at the patience of the farmers and their families.
They ought to have shot us ; on the contrary, they were as
hospitably kind and courteous to us as if we had deserved it.
In one of these camps we found Ab Grimes, an Upper
Mississippi pilot, who afterwards became famous as a dare
devil rebel spy, whose career bristled with desperate adven
tures. The look and style of his comrades suggested that
they had not come into the war to play, and their deeds made
good the conjecture later. They were fine horsemen and
good revolver-shots ; but their favourite arm was the lasso.
Each had one at his pommel, and could snatch a man out of
the saddle with it every time, on a full gallop, at any reason
able distance.
In another camp the chief was a fierce and profane old
blacksmith of sixty, and he had furnished his twenty recruits
with gigantic home-made bowie-knives, to be swung with
the two hands, like the machetes of the Isthmus. It was a
MY MILITARY CAMPAIGN 371
grisly spectacle to see that earnest band practising their
murderous cuts and slashes under the eye of that remorseless
old fanatic.
The last camp which we fell back upon was in a hollow
near the village of Florida, where I was born in Monroe
County. Here we were warned, one day, that a Union
colonel was sweeping down on us with a whole regiment
at his heels. This looked decidedly serious. Our boys went
apart and consulted ; then we went back and told the other
companies present that the war was a disappointment to us
and we were going to disband. They were getting ready,
themselves, to fall back on some place or other, and were
only waiting for General Tom Harris, who was expected to
arrive at any moment ; so they tried to persuade us to wait
a little while, but the majority of us said no, we were
accustomed to falling back, and didn t need any of Tom
Harris s help ; we could get along perfectly well without him
and save time too. So about half of our fifteen, including
myself, mounted and left on the instant; the others yielded
to persuasion and stayed stayed through the war.
An hour later we met General Harris on the road, with
two or three people in his company his staff, probably, but
we could not tell ; none of them was in uniform ; uniforms
had not come into vogue among us yet. Harris ordered us
back ; but we told him there was a Union colonel coining
with a whole regiment in his wake, and it looked as if" there
was going to be a disturbance ; so we had concluded to go
home. He raged a little, but it was of no use ; our minds
were made up. We had done our share ; had killed one
man, exterminated one army, such as it was ; let him go and
kill the rest, and that would end the war. I did not see that
brisk young general again until last year ; then he was
wearing white hair and whiskers.
372 MY MILITARY CAMPAIGN
In time I came to know that Union colonel whose
coming frightened me out of the war and crippled the
Southern cause to that extent General Grant. I came
within a few hours of seeing him when he was as unknown
as I was myself ; at a time when anybody could have said,
Grant ? Ulysses S. Grant ? I do not remember hearing
the name before. It seems difficult to realise that there was
once a time when such a remark could be rationally made ;
but there was, and I was within a few miles of the place and
the occasion too, though proceeding in the other direction.
The thoughtful will not throw this war-paper of mine
lightly aside as being valueless. It has this value : it is a not
unfair picture of what went on in many and many a militia
camp in the first months of the rebellion, when the green
recruits were without discipline, without the steadying and
heartening influence or trained leaders ; when all their
circumstances were new and strange, and charged with