A Boy Trooper With Sheridan. Allen Stanton P.

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СКАЧАТЬ the first sergeant, all the duty sergeants and the corporals would yell out:

      “Turn out for reveille roll-call!”

      “Be lively, now – turn out!”

      As a result of this shouting by the “non-coms” the boys soon began to pay no attention to the bugle call, but naturally waited till they heard the signal to “turn out” given by the sergeants and corporals. And in a very short time they ceased to hear the bugle when the first call was sounded.

      In active service in the Army of the Potomac so familiar with the calls did the soldiers become that when cavalry and infantry were bivouacked together, and the long roll was sounded by the drummers, it would not be heard by the troopers, and when the cavalry buglers blew their calls the foot soldiers would sleep undisturbed. In front of Petersburg troops would sleep soundly within ten feet of a heavy battery that was firing shot and shell into the enemy’s works all night. But let one of the guards on the line of breastworks behind which they were “dreaming of home” discharge his musket, and the sleepers would be in line ready for battle almost in the twinkling of an eye. And let the cavalry trumpeter make the least noise on his bugle, and the troopers would hear it at once.

      A few weeks before our battalion left Camp Meigs for the front Mrs. E. L. Waterman of Berlin, mother of Irving Waterman, paid us a visit. She brought with her a basket full of goodies. Home-made pies, bread, butter, cheese, cookies and fried cakes were included in the supplies. She took up her quarters at the picture gallery of Mr. Holmes, the camp photographer, and we went to see her as often as our duties would permit. She brought us socks knit by our friends at home, and many articles for our comfort. About the first thing she said was: “My boys, what do they give you to eat?”

      “Bread and meat and beans and coffee,” we answered.

      “No butter?”

      “No.”

      “I thought not. I had heard the soldiers had to eat their bread without butter, with nothing but coffee to wash it down, so I brought you a few pounds of butter.”

      And the dear woman remained at the gallery, and Irving and I would drop over and eat the good things she fixed for us. If we had taken our commissary stores to the barracks they would have been stolen.

      Mrs. Waterman asked Irving and myself to have our pictures taken. Neither of us had ever been photographed or tintyped, but we took kindly to the idea. We sat together, and the picture, a tintype, was pronounced an excellent likeness. What a trying performance it was, though! We were all braced up with an iron rest back of the head, and told to “look about there – you can wink, but don’t move.” Of course the tintype presented the subject as one appears when looking into a mirror. The right hand was the left, and our buttons were on the wrong side in the picture. But Mrs. Waterman declared the tintype to be “as near like them as two peas,” and we accepted her verdict. The dear old lady has kept that picture all these years.

      The soldier boys resorted to all sorts of expedients to “beat the machine.” That is, to so arrange their arms and accoutrements that when the tintype was taken it would not be upside down or wrong end to. To this end the saber-belt would be put on wrong side up so that the scabbard would hang on the right side – that would bring it on the left side, where it belonged in the picture. I tried that plan one day and then stood at “parade rest,” with the saber in front of me. I put back my left foot instead of my right to stand in that position, and when the picture was presented, I congratulated myself that I had made a big hit. But when I showed it to an old soldier in the company he humiliated me by the remark:

      “It’s all very fine for a recruit, but a soldier wouldn’t hold his saber with his left hand and put his right hand over it at parade rest.”

      Sure enough. I had changed my feet to make them appear all right, but had forgotten the hands. But recruits were not supposed to know everything on the start.

      We had photographs taken as well as tintypes. But the art of photography has greatly improved since the war. Most of the photographs of that day that I have seen of late are badly faded, and it is next to impossible to have a good copy made. Not so with the tintypes. They remain unfaded, and excellent photographic copies can be secured. In many a home to-day hang the pictures of the soldier boy, some of them life-sized portraits copied from the tintypes taken in the days of the war.

      I know homes where the gray-haired mothers still cling to the little tintype picture – the only likeness they have of a darling boy who was offered as a sacrifice for liberty. How tenderly the picture is handled! How sacredly the mother has preserved it! The hinges of the frame are broken – worn out with constant opening. The clasp is gone. The plush that lined the frame opposite the picture is faded and worn. But the face of the boy is there. Surviving veterans understand something of the venerable lady’s meaning when she puts the picture to her lips and with tears in her eyes says:

      “Yes, he was only a boy. I couldn’t consent to let him go, and I couldn’t say no. I could only pray that he would come back to me – if it were God’s will. He didn’t come back. But they said he did his duty. He died in a noble cause, but it was hard to say ‘Thy will be done,’ at first, when the news came that he’d been killed. I’m so thankful I have his picture – the only one he ever had taken. He was a Christian boy, and they wrote me that his last words as his comrades stood about him under a tree where he had been borne, were, that he died in the hope of a glorious resurrection, and that mother would find him in Heaven to welcome her when she came. There’s comfort in that. And I’ll soon be there. I shall meet my boy again, and there will be no more separation. No more cruel rebellions.” The early war-time pictures are curiosities to-day, particularly to veterans who study them. Not a few of the special artists of the first year of the war seemed to have gained whatever knowledge of the appearance of troops in battle array that they had from tintype pictures. I have before me as I write, a battle scene “sketched by our special artist at the front.” The officers all wear their swords on the right side, and in the foreground is an officer mounting his horse from the off side – a feat never attempted in military experience but once, to my knowledge, and then by a militia officer on the staff of a Troy general, since the war. In some of these pictorial papers of the early war-days armies are represented marching into battle in full-dress uniform and with unbroken step and perfect alignment.

      One thing, however, always puzzled me in these pictures – before I went to war – and that was how the infantry could march with measured tread – regulation step of twenty-eight inches, and only one hundred and ten steps per minute – and keep up with the major-generals and other officers of high rank who appeared in front of their men, and with their horses on a dead run in the direction of the enemy! These heroic leaders always rode with their hats in one hand and their swords in the other, so there was no chance for them to hold in their horses. But the puzzle ceased to be a puzzle when I reached the front. I found that the special artists had drawn on their imagination instead of “on the spot,” and that it was not customary for commanding generals to get in between the contending lines of battle and slash right and left and cut up as the artists had represented. In the majority of cases, great battles were fought by generals on both sides who were in position to watch, so far as possible, the whole line of battle, and to be ready to direct such movements and changes as were demanded by the progress of the fight. To do this they must necessarily be elsewhere than in front of their armies, riding down the enemy’s skirmishers, and leaping their horses over cannon.

      It is possible, however, that the special artists did not fully understand the danger to which a commanding general would be exposed, galloping around on his charger between the armies just coming together in a terrible clash. At any rate, the specials were willing to take their chances with their heroes – on paper. I have in my possession a picture of the “Commencement of the Action at Bull Run – Sherman’s Battery Engaging the Enemy’s Masked Battery.” In this picture, СКАЧАТЬ