The Sandburg Treasury

by Carl Sandburg

  I had one last sleep in the Mercer, crossed over to Council Bluffs, had breakfast, then caught one freight train after another till I came in sight of Galesburg the afternoon of October fifteenth.

  I walked along Berrien Street to the only house in the United States where I could open a door without knocking and walk in for a kiss from the woman of the house. They gave me a sitdown and as they had had only two or three letters from me, they asked questions about where I’d been. When I showed my father fifteen dollars and a few nickels, he said the money would come in handy and I should watch it. The clean bed sheets that night felt good.

  Mart was suspicious of my fine suit of clothes. “I’ll bet you didn’t buy it new. If you bought it, it was a hockshop.” So I told him how I got it. Mart said that along in August he had read in a newspaper about a hobo who fell off the bumpers in western Kansas and was mangled to death. The folks hadn’t read it and he didn’t tell them. “But I was afraid, Cully, that maybe it was you.” Then I told him how in Colorado it could have been me.

  What had the trip done to me? I couldn’t say. It had changed me. I was easier about looking people in the eye. When questions came I was quicker at answering them or turning them off. I had been a young stranger meeting many odd strangers and I had practiced at having answers. At home and among my old chums of the Dirty Dozen they knew I had changed but they could no more tell how than I. Away deep in my heart now I had hope as never before. Struggles lay ahead, I was sure, but whatever they were I would not be afraid of them.

  Sixteen: In the Army

  I WENT TO work on the Schwarz farm three miles east of Galesburg. I was up at four-thirty in the morning, curried two horses, and Mr. Schwarz and I milked twenty-two cows. I milked eight while Mr. Schwarz, older and faster, milked fourteen. We put the milk into eight-gallon cans and loaded them into a milk wagon. After breakfast I drove the milk into town and poured it out in pints and quarts. I bought a Chicago Record every day and read in the wagon going back to the farm the two-column Home University series of lectures by University of Chicago professors on literature, history, politics, and government. The horses didn’t mind. They liked going slow while I read.

  After dinner I washed the cans and again Mr. Schwarz and I milked the cows. Mr. Schwarz was tall, somewhat stoop-shouldered, with a black beard—a kindly and gracious man, his people Pennsylvania Dutch. Mrs. Schwarz was robust, matronly, and when her fourteen-year-old daughter one evening at the supper table used the word “spondulix” she said sternly, “Why, Ethel, I’m surprised at you using such language.” They were Methodists, well read, devout but not pious. You might have said they were a Youth’s Companion family come true. Mrs. Schwarz had noticed that I spent the hour or two after supper reading among their books and magazines. She said to me one day with a beautifully serious look, “Charlie, I think you’re going to make something of yourself.” Until then Mary had been the only one to hand me anything like that. I was in bed every night at eight-thirty. I had come back to Galesburg weighing one hundred and thirty-six pounds and on the Schwarz farm I gained sixteen pounds.

  About the middle of February I was sorry to leave the Schwarz home. I hired out to a blank-faced Swede to learn the painter’s trade. At last it had come my way, a chance to learn a trade. A few of the ten-hour working days I was trusted to put on the first coat of paint. But most of the time I scraped and sandpapered. I climbed ladders outside of houses and stepladders inside and pushed sandpaper over wood to make it smooth for the painter. The boss was a man spare of words. My “Good morning” would bring a grunt from him. He believed in work without talk and toil without laughter. Once when he caught me singing his face had the look of a pickle fresh out of vinegar.

  Each morning six days a week I was there at seven o’clock ready to wear out more sandpaper making more boards smooth for the boss and another painter. Not as much as a half-day a week did I swing a brush to put on a first coat. How long would this go on till they would let me put on a second and last coat?

  On the night of February 15, 1898, I went to bed at nine-thirty. Not until later did I know that at two o’clock that morning the Secretary of the Navy in Washington heard a knock at the door that woke him and he was handed a telegram that nearly keeled him over. He got a White House watchman on the phone and told him to wake the President. On the phone Mr. McKinley heard the telegram read to him: “MAINE BLOWN UP IN HAVANA HARBOR AT NINE-FORTY TONIGHT. MANY WOUNDED AND DOUBTLESS MORE KILLED OR DROWNED.” The Maine was a first-class battleship and of her three hundred and fifty-two officers and men, two hundred and sixty were dead and the ship had settled to the harbor bottom.

  As the days went by and I went on sandpapering, I believed what I read and heard—that the same Spanish government whose General Weyler had killed thousands of Cuban patriots wanting independence and a republic had a hand in blowing up the Maine. I learned later that nobody knows how the Maine was exploded, whether some man did it or it was an act of God. I was going along with millions of other Americans who were about ready for a war to throw the Spanish government out of Cuba and let the people of Cuba have their republic. If a war did come, I knew what I would do. Across March and early April while the country roared with excitement, I went on sandpapering and thinking but I didn’t tell my blank-faced boss what I was thinking.

  President McKinley declared war and on April twenty-sixth I was sworn into Company C., Sixth Infantry Regiment of Illinois Volunteers, for two years of service. The regiment had been part of the State Militia. Company C was a living part of Galesburg, had its drill hall, marched in uniform with rifles and bayonets on public occasions, and went to Springfield once a year for regimental maneuvers. The company needed a dozen recruits to fill its quota and I was among the earliest. I knew most of the privates and had worked for Corporal Cully Rose at the Auditorium. About three-fourths of the members were from Galesburg and the rest from farms and country towns around Galesburg. They elected their own officers and you could hear fellows say, “No West Pointers in his regiment.”

  When I quit my job and told the family I was going to be a soldier they were sad and somewhat puzzled, but they knew they couldn’t stop me. Mart spoke for the family, “We’d like the honor of having a United States soldier in the family but we don’t want you to be killed.” I said it might not be a real war and if it was I might not get shot because some soldiers always come back home. And besides, having seen the West I would now see the East and maybe the Atlantic Ocean and Cuba. The family were all there, with hundreds of other families, when the train carrying Company C pulled out from the Q. depot, now the “Burlington station.”

  On the fair grounds at Springfield we were quartered in an immense brick building used for livestock exhibits. Where prize milk cows and blue-ribbon bulls had slept on straw we likewise had straw under our blankets in late April and early May. We were not lacking the lads who could moo like a Guernsey cow or bellow like a Holstein bull. While still in civilian clothes I was handed a Springfield rifle and put through the manual of arms and company drill.

  In about ten days I slid into a uniform, a heavy blue wool shirt, a coat of dark blue with brass buttons that went to the throat, pants of a light-blue wool cloth double as thick as the coat cloth. This was the same uniform the privates under Grant and Sherman had worn thirty-five years before, intended for wear in those border states of the South where snow fell and zero weather might come as at Fort Donel-son the night Grant attacked. The little cap wouldn’t shed rain from your ears, and above the stiff black visor it ran flat as though your head should be flat there. I felt honored to wear the uniform of famous Union armies and yet I had mistrust of it.

  In a big room of the state-capitol building a hundred of us passed before an examining surgeon, a German with a pronounced accent and a high falsetto voice. He was no stickler for regulations, this surgeon. When our friend Joe Dunn came he was found to be an inch or two short of the required height. The tears began running down Joe’s face. The surgeon l
ooked toward officers near by and they gave him a nod. And he wrapped the measuring tape around a finger, measured again and found that Joe would pass.

  We roamed around the capital, walked past the governor’s house, out past the home of Abraham Lincoln. On the train to Washington rumors ran thick and fast about how soon we would be shooting Spaniards. On the day coaches we each had a wicker-covered seat to sit in and to take our night’s sleep in. Canned beans, canned salmon, bread and coffee, were the rations. At some stations crowds met the train with cheers and smiles. The train arrived in Washington and the night was dark when it was shunted to Falls Church, Virginia. We marched two miles to level ground with underbrush and woods around it. We put up tents and slept on the ground, two soldiers to a tent. The next morning we went to the woods, cut saplings with crotched sticks and branches and made bunks to lay our blankets on.

  I was in luck to have for a tent mate Andrew Tanning, as clean, scrupulous and orderly a corporal as ever served Uncle Sam. He was born in Sweden, had a prim face, a small mouth with a neat small mustache, and at no moment in our tent bunks at arm’s length from each other did he ever let out one echo of a snore. Twice a week he wrote letters to his fine Swede girl in Galesburg whom he later married. Next to her he loved his Springfield rifle, and he kept it spotless. He took for himself the number of his rifle and would enter the tent saying, “Here comes Old Thirty-eight.” He had belonged to Company C for two years and was a member of the Monarch Club, so I had danced with his sweetheart, Amanda Hanson, and her sister Tillie who was slim and in a waltz light as a white feather in a blue wind. Andy had been houseman of the Union Hotel when I was its barbershop porter. So we had plenty to talk about.

  Across late May and all of June we drilled. We filled our canteens from a piped water supply and washed our shirts, socks, and underclothing at a murky creek in the woods. Most of the time we ate field rations as though we were in a campaign, bean soup and pork and beans more often than any other items. Our company cook—Arthur Metcalf, with his moon face and wide smiling mouth—was a prize. He did the best he could with what the War Department, through its quartermasters, let him have. I saw him one morning patiently cut away from a flitch of pork about a quarter of it that was alive with maggots. This was seven miles from the City of Washington where the Department of War had its office.

  Our captain was Thomas Leslie McGirr, a second-rank Galesburg lawyer, a tall heavy man with a distinct paunch, heavy jaws, and a large mustache slightly graying. He kept by him a large yellow-haired St. Bernard dog named Smuggler, who in sight of the men was occasionally fed juicy sirloin steaks. Our first lieutenant was Conrad Byloff, my classmate in the Seventh Ward school, who had learned the boilermaker’s trade working for the Q. His father had been a captain in the Swedish army, and Con himself seemed to be a born commander. The men had depths of affection for him; he could be stern giving commands, but he never drilled us without giving us a smile that said we could get fun out of what we were doing. Our second lieutenant was Daniel K. Smyth, a scholar and a gentleman ever considerate of his men.

  Of the nine sergeants and eleven corporals I couldn’t think of one I hated. How can you possibly forget a first sergeant who trains his voice every day by six and eight times calling off a hundred names? After a few weeks some of the men without looking in a book could call the roll from Benjamin Anderson to Henry Clay Woodward as smoothly as F. Elmer Johnson, first sergeant, who kept records, read orders, and was the hardest-worked man in the company. Corporal Ed Peckenpaugh was up and down the company street and only the hard of hearing failed to get his baritone giving out “I Guess I’ll Have to Telegraph My Baby.” Corporal James Switzer was the company bugler, a handsome boy of seventeen, nicknamed “Mim.”

  Ten of our company were Knox students and two were from Lombard; twenty or more were farm boys. At least twenty had had fathers, uncles, or near kinsmen in the Civil War. All had mixed motives in enlisting. Love of adventure, or a curiosity about facing dangers and standing hardships was one and, I would judge, the outstanding one. A mystic love of country and the flag was there in degree among most of the men. Breaking away from a monotonous home environment to go where there was excitement could be read in the talk of some fellows. At least two of the older men had troublesome wives at home. The hope of pensions after service was sometimes definitely mentioned. Over all of us in 1898 was the shadow of the Civil War and the men who fought it to the end that had come only thirty-three years before our enlistment. Our motives were as mixed as theirs. In the lonely hours of guard duty you could study about why you had enlisted.

  On leave for a day we walked two miles to Falls Church, took a trolley to Washington, saw the Capitol and walked past the White House. I had my first look at the Ford Theatre outside and inside and the outside of the Peterson House across the street.

  For our State Militia caps we got felt hats with wide brims, and to replace our Springfield rifles we were issued Krag-Jörgensens. July sixth saw hustling and gabble. We began riding an Atlantic Coast Line train across Virginia and North Carolina to Charleston, South Carolina. We had our first look at tobacco and cotton growing, at the mansions, cabins, and hovels of the South, and at stations here and there men selling bottles of “cawn lickah” that had the color of rain water. We slept overnight in our coach seats and the next day quartered in big cotton warehouses on the wharf. We went swimming next to the wharf, and you could see the Illinois prairie boys taking mouthfuls of Atlantic Ocean water to taste it, then calling to each other, “It is salt, isn’t it?” As we strolled around Charleston in our Civil War uniforms, the people were warmhearted and cordial. Restaurants and saloons refused to take our money for what they served us. Negroes stood quietly to one side and took off their hats to us. We had been issued hardtack, tough and flat biscuits that were as good as money. On a dare, a Southern Belle gave one of our boys a big resounding kiss for one hardtack.

  We saw lying at anchor the Rita, a lumber-hauling freighter, the first ship our navy had captured from the Spanish. Six companies of the Sixth Illinois boarded her on July eleventh, each man given a bunk made of new rough lumber. Running your bare arm or leg over it, you met splinters. The air below was heavy, warm and humid. On clear nights several hundred men brought their blankets up and covered the upper deck as they slept. The first day out one man said, “This tub rolls like a raw egg in a glass of whisky.” One of the seasick said to another, “Why is your face so lemon-green?” The rations were mostly cold canned beans and canned salmon. The day or two when canned tomatoes were issued we called holidays. The band played every day and men were thankful. A waterspout was sighted one day, one shark and a few flying fish another day, and the landlubbers felt this was part of what they had come for.

  The Rita arrived in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, on the evening of July seventeenth, our band playing and cheers coming to us from the decks of famous battleships, the Oregon, the Indiana, the Iowa, and more cheers from cruisers and torpedo boats. In the morning Colonel Jack Foster and staff officers went ashore and came back soon with word that Santiago was taken and we wouldn’t be put ashore to fight in Cuba. Some men were disappointed; others were satisfied. Also, it was reported, there were ashore some four hundred troop cases of yellow fever and Colonel Jack had been ordered to get back to the Rita at once.

  We lay at anchor a few days, and when we sailed out of Guantánamo Bay, rumors ran that we were going to Porto Rico. If we had been reading United States newspapers, we would have believed we were going to land at Cape Fajardo near San Juan, the capital of Porto Rico. But about halfway to Porto Rico, General Nelson A. Miles, commander of the three thousand men in this expedition, changed his mind. Instead of landing at Cape Fajardo on the north coast we would land on the south coast of Porto Rico. The idea came to him that since the War Department had told the newspapers and the newspapers had told the world where his expedition was going to land and march and fight it might be safer and easier to land somewhere else where he wasn’t expected. T
here were those who said afterward that to attack the fortified harbor of San Juan would have required the navy and the guns of the fleet and General Miles as an army man preferred to land on the south coast and have the army take over the island from the south so that in time San Juan wouldn’t have much of an island to govern. We heard later too that the Secretary of War and many others in the United States were stupefied to learn that General Miles had changed his mind and begun operations on the south coast.

  Soon after daylight on July twenty-fifth we sighted a harbor and moved into it. Ahead we saw gunfire from a ship and landing boats filled with blue-jackets moving toward shore. We were ordered to put on our cartridge belts and with rifles get into full marching outfits. We heard shooting, glanced toward shore and saw white puffs of smoke while we stood waiting our turns to climb down rope ladders into long boats called lighters. We were rowed to a shallow beach where we dropped into water above our hips. Holding rifles over our heads, we waded ashore.

  We were in Guánica, a one-street town with palm and coconut trees new to us. We expected to be ordered into action against Spanish troops somewhere in the town or near-by hills. We were marched to a field near the town where we waited over noon and afternoon. We ate our supper of cold canned beans and hardtack and soon were ordered to march. When we came to a halt we waited in the dark and heard shots that seemed not far away. This was the one time on that island when most of us expected to go into battle. And it didn’t happen. We waited and marched back to our field near Guánica.