Page:McClure's Magazine volume 10.djvu/596

204 army sergeant very little higher than the raw men held who stumbled around at their drilling in frightened, sweaty droves. These raw men looked like a grievance committee following the president's special car across a railroad yard.

Sleeping in tents is a lark for the first few nights for youngsters used to steel springs on their beds and Swiss curtains at their bedroom windows. "But,"—as the governor of a Western State said, when opposing mustering the militia on a tented field and urging the use of a neighboring fort lately abandoned by the regular army troops,—"but what if it rains?" The first week in May this year was a rainy week out West, and in the tented field of a certain State on the Missouri the measles broke out, and all the horses attached to the chariot of Mars shook their tugs a-laughing. Probably the first steps taken in making that human engine of death, a regiment, are always clumsy, and will provoke laughter to the end of time. Probably the original second lieutenant in the first militia company ever organized tried to get "chummy" with his colonel; but that fact did not make the spectacle any less absurd this spring, when it was being repeated all over the land. The banker's son in the ranks needs several weeks to learn that the dealer in staple and fancy groceries who has white on his trousers and gold braid on his cap must not be called "Bill" and slapped on the back. And, on the other hand, it takes time for the captain just from the blacksmith shop to learn that he must snub the young dry goods clerks who, two weeks before the call came for troops, would not have seen him on the street.

In the Civil War a Kansas cavalry regiment two days old was standing on a hill in Missouri, watching a fight. A company of Confederates took a position on a hill back of the Kansans, In a rash moment a Kansas horseman galloped toward the new-comers. The colonel saw the private, and called:

"Oh, Tom, come back here."

"What do you want?" asked the private, checking up.

"Well, you come back here. What you goin' over there for? They'll get you," answered the officer.

"What if they do? If I want to get killed it's none of your business," replied the private.

"Tom Jennings, I command you to come back here," roared the colonel. Then the officer added, as Jennings didn't move: "Aw, Tom, don't be a fool; come on back."

"Say, Marsh Murdock, you think you're mighty smart because you've gone and log-rolled and got to be colonel; but I'm right here to tell you that no little four-by-nine editor can boss me around. I'm goin' over to see who them fellers are."

He started to turn around, when Colonel