Doc.—What’s the matter?
Me—Bilious.
Doc.—Run out your tongue. Take a swallow out of the black bottle.
That seems very simple, indeed, but it nearly killed me. When he told me to run out my tongue, I run out perhaps six inches of the lower end of it, the doctor glanced at it as though it was nothing to him anyway, and then he told me to take a swallow out of the bottle. In all my life I had never taken four doses of medicine, and when I did the medicine was disguised in preserves or something. The hospital steward handed me the bottle that a dozen other sick soldiers had drank out of, and it was sticky all around the top, and contained something that looked like castor oil, for greasing a buggy. He told me to take a good big swallow, and I tried to do so. Talk about the suffering brought on by the war, it seems to me nobody ever suffered as I did, trying to drink a swallow of that castor oil out of a two quart bottle, that was dirty. It run so slow that it seemed, an age before I got enough to swallow, and then it seemed another age before the oil could pass a given point in my neck. And great Caesar’s ghost how it did taste. I think it went down my neck, and I just had strength enough to ask the steward to give me something to take the taste out of my mouth. He handed me a blue pill. O, I could have killed him. I rushed to the chaplain’s tent and took a drink of blackberry brandy, and my life was saved, but for three years after that I was never sick enough to get farther than the chaplain’s quarters.
I suppose the meanest trick that was ever played on a raw recruit, was played on me while we were in camp at that place. It seemed to me that some of the boys got jealous of me, because I had become a hero, accidentally. May be some of them did not believe I had killed as many of the enemy as I had owned up to having killed. Anyway every little while some soldier would say that he thought it was a mean man that would go out and kill a lot of rebels and not bury them. He said a man that would do that was a regular pot-hunter, who killed game and left it on the ground to spoil. They made lots of such uncharitable remarks, but I did not pay much attention to to them. I had a tent-mate who took a great interest in me, and he said no soldier’s life was safe who did not wear a breast-plate, and he asked me if I did not bring any breast-plate with me. I told him I never heard of a breastplate, and asked him what it was. He said it was a vest made of the finest spring steel, that could be worn under the clothes, which was so strong that a bullet could not penetrate it. He supposed of course I had one, when he heard of the fight I had, and said none of the old boys would go into a fight without one, as it covered the vital parts, and saved many a life. I bit like a bass. If there was anything I wanted more than a discharge, it was a breast-plate. If the chaplain should succeed in getting me a soft job, where there was no danger, I could get along without my breast-plate, but there was no sure thing about the chaplain, so I asked the soldier where I could get a breastplate. He said the quartermaster used to issue them, but he didn’t have any on hand now, but he said he knew where there was one that once belonged to a soldier who was killed, and he thought he could get it for me. I asked him how it happened that the soldier was killed, when he had a breast-plate, and he told me the man was killed by eating green peaches. Of course I couldn’t expect a breastplate to save me from the effects of eating unripe fruit, and I felt that if it would save me from bullets it would be worth all it cost, so I told the soldier to get it for me. That evening he brought it around, and he helped me put it on. I learned afterwards that it was an old breast-plate that an officer had brought to the regiment when the war broke out, and that it had been played on raw recruits for two years. After I had got it on, the soldier suggested that we go out with several other dare devils, and run the guard and go down town and play billiards, and have a jolly time. I asked him if the guard would not shoot at us, and he said the guards would be all right, and if they did shoot they would shoot at the breast-plates, as all the boys had them on. So about six of us sneaked through the guards, went to town and had a big time, and came back along towards morning, each with a canteen of whisky. It was not easy getting back inside the lines, as the moon was shining, but we got by the guards, and then my friends suggested that we take our breast-plates off and put them on behind us, as the guards, if they shot at all, would be firing in our rear. I took mine off and put it on behind my pants, and just then somebody fired a gun, and the boys said “run,” and I started ahead, and the firing continued, and about every jump I could hear and feel something striking my breast-plate behind, which seemed to me to be bullets, and I was glad I had the breast-plate on, though afterwards I found that the boys behind me were firing off their revolvers in the air, and throwing small stones at my breast-plate. Presently a bullet, as I supposed, struck me in the back above the breast-plate, and I could feel blood trickling down my back, and I knew I was wounded. O, I hankered for gore, before enlisting, and while editing a paper, and now I had got it, got gore till I couldn’t rest. The blood run down my side, down my leg, into my boot, and I could feel I was wading in my own blood. And great heaven’s, how it did smell. I had never smelled blood before, that I knew of, and I thought it had the most peculiar, pungent, intoxicating odor. I ran towards my quarters as fast as possible, fainting almost, from imaginary loss of blood, and finally rushed into my tent, threw myself on my bunk and called loudly for the doctor and chaplain, and then I fainted. When I came to I was surrounded by the doctor, and a lot of the boys, all laughing, and the chaplain was trying to say something pious, while trying to keep a straight face. “Have you succeeded in staunching the blood, doc?” I asked, in a trembling voice. He said the blood was quite staunch, but the whisky could never be saved. I did not know what he meant, and I turned to the chaplain and asked him if he wouldn’t be kind enough to say something appropriate to the occasion. I told him I had been a bad man, had lied some, as he well knew, and had been guilty of things that would bar me out of the angel choir, but that if he had any influence at the throne of grace, and could manage to sneak me in under the canvass anyway, he could have the balance of my bounty, and all the pay that might be coming to me. The chaplain held up the breast-plate that had been removed by kind hands, from the back portion of my person, and said I had better take that along with me, as it would be handy to wear when I wanted to stand with my back to the fire in hades. I could not understand why the good man should joke me, on my death bed, and I rolled over with my back to the wall, to weep, unobserved, and I felt the blood sticking to my clothes and person, and I asked the doctor why he did not dress my wound. He said he should have to send the wound to the tin-shop to be dressed, and then they all laughed. This made me indignant, and I turned over and faced the crowd, and asked them if they had no hearts, that they could thus mock at a dying man. The doctor held up my canteen with a hole in it, made by a stone thrown by one of my companions, and said, “You damned fool, you are not wounded. Somebody busted your canteen, and the whiskey run down your leg and into your boot, and you, like an idiot, thought it was your life blood ebbing away. Couldn’t you tell that it was whiskey by the smell?” I felt of myself, where I thought I was wounded, and couldn’t find any hole, and then I took off my boot, and emptied the whisky out, and felt stronger, and finally I got up, and the boys went away laughing at me, leaving the chaplain, who was kind enough to tell me that of all the raw recruits that had ever come to the regiment, he thought I was the biggest idiot of the lot, to let the boys play that ancient breast-plate and canteen joke on me. I asked him if the boys didn’t all wear breast-plates, and he said “naw!” He told me that was the only breast-plate in the whole Department of the Gulf, and it was kept to play on recruits, and that I must keep it until a new recruit came that was green enough to allow the boys to do him up. So I hid the breast-plate under my bunk, and went to bed and tried to dream out some method of getting even with my persecutors, while the chaplain went out, after offering to hold himself in readiness, day or night, to come and pray for me, if I was wounded in the canteen any more.
CHAPTER IV.
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br /> I Yearn for a Furlough—I Interview the General—I am Detailed to Carry a Rail—I Make a Horse-trade With the Chaplain—I am Put in Charge of a Funeral.
I had now been fighting the battles of my country for two weeks, and felt that I needed rest, and one day I became so homesick that it did seem as though it would kill me. Including the week it had taken me to get from home to my regiment, three weeks had elapsed since I bid good-bye to my friends, and I wanted to go home. I would lay awake nights and think of people at home and wonder what they were doing, and if they were laying awake nights thinking of me, or caring whether I was alive, or buried in the swamps of the South. It was about the time of year when at home we always went off shooting, and I thought how much better it was to go off shooting ducks and geese, and chickens, that could not shoot back, than to be hunting bloodthirsty Confederates that were just as liable to hunt us, and who could kill, with great ease. I thought of a pup I had at home that was just the right age to train, and that he would be spoiled if he was not trained that season. O, how I did want to train that pup. The news that one of my comrades had been granted a furlough, after three years’ service, and that he was going home, made me desperate, and I dreamed that I had waylaid and murdered the fortunate soldier, and gone home on his furlough. The idea of getting a furlough was the one idea in my mind, and the next morning as I took my horse to the veterinary surgeon for treatment,2 I had a talk with the horse doctor about the possibilities of getting a furlough. I had known him before the war, when he kept a livery stable, and as I owed him a small livery bill, I thought he would give it to me straight. The horse doctor had his sleeves rolled up, and was holding a horse’s tongue in one hand while he poured some medicine down the animal’s throat out of a bottle with the other hand, which made me sorry for the horse, as I remembered my experience at surgeon’s call, in drinking a dose of castor oil out of a bottle, and I was mean-enough to be glad they played it on horses as well as the soldiers. The horse doctor returned the horse’s tongue to it’s mouth, kicked the animal in the ribs, turned and wiped his hands on a bale of hay, and said:
“Well, George, to get a furlough a man has got to have plenty of gall, especially a man who has only been to the front a couple of weeks. There is no use making an application in the regular way, to your captain, have him endorse it and send it to regimental headquarters, and so on to brigade headquarters, because you would never hear of it again. My idea would be for you to go right to the general commanding the division, and tell him you have got to go home. But you mustn’t go crawling to him, and whining. He is a quick-tempered man, and he hates a coward. Go to him and talk familiar with him, and act as though you had always associated with him, and slap him on the shoulder, and make yourself at home. Just make up a good, plausible story, and give it to him, and if he seems irritated, give him to understand that he can t frighten you, and just as likely as not he will give you a furlough. I don’t say he will, mind you, but it would be just like him. But he does like to be treated familiar like, by the boys.”
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