IT was a kind of off-night, the 23d of October, 1862, twenty-four hours after the battle of Pocotaligo, on the South Carolina coast.
We had to stop over there until morning, because the creek was out of its banks, and we couldn’t get across without daylight. There were only about a dozen of us, and we had to build a camp-fire under the trees.
After supper we fell to talking, and naturally we talked of war things. There wasn’t anything else to talk about then.
There was the long-legged mountaineer, with the deep voice, and the drawl in his speech which aided the suggestion that he kept his voice in his boots and had to pump it up when anything was to be said. Opposite him was the alert, rapid-speaking fellow, who had come in as a conscript and had made a superb volunteer,—a fellow who had an opinion ready made on every subject that could be mentioned, and who was accustomed to wind up most conversations with a remark so philosophical as to seem strangely out of keeping with the rest of the inconsequent things that he had said. Then there were the two mountaineers who never said anything because they never had anything to say. They had reached that point of intellectual development where the theory is accepted that there ought to be thought behind every utterance; and under this misapprehension they abstained from utterance.
Joe was there, but Joe wasn’t talking that night. Joe was surly and sullen. He had had to kill his horse at Pocotaligo the day before, and all the honors he had harvested from that action had not reconciled him to the loss. The new horse he had drawn was, in his opinion, “a beast.” Of course all horses are beasts, but that isn’t precisely what Joe meant. Besides, he had received a letter from his sweetheart just before we left camp,—she’s his wife now, and the mother of his dozen or more children,—in which that young woman had expressed doubts as to whether, after all, he was precisely the kind of man to whom she ought to “give her life.” Joe was only seventeen years of age at that time, and he minded little things like that. Still again, Joe had the toothache. Besides that, we were hungry after our exceedingly scant meal of roasted sweet potatoes. Besides that, it was raining.
All the circumstances contributed to make us introspective and psychological in our conversation.
The long-legged mountaineer with the deep voice was telling some entirely inconsequent story about somebody who wasn’t known to any of us, and none of us was listening. After a while he said: “He was that sort of a feller that never felt fear in his life.”
From Joe: “There never was any such fellow.”
The long mountaineer: “Well, that’s what he said, anyhow.”
From Joe: “He lied, then.”
“Well,” continued the long-legged mountaineer, “that’s what he said, and he sort o’ lived up to it. If he had any fear, he didn’t show it till that time I was tellin’ you about, when he went all to pieces and showed the white feather.”
“There,” growled Joe, “what did I tell you? He was lying all the time.”
The postscript philosopher on the other side of the fire broke in, saying: “Well, maybe his breakfast went bad on him that morning. An overdone egg would make a coward out of the Duke of Wellington.”
Joe made the general reflection that “some people locate their courage in their transverse colons.”
“What’s a transverse colon?” asked one of the mountaineers. Joe got up, stretched himself, and made no answer. Perhaps none was expected.
“Well,” asked the long-legged mountaineer, “ain’t they people that don’t feel no fear?”
The glib little fellow quickly responded: “Let’s find out. Let’s hold an experience meeting. I suppose we’re a pretty fairly representative body, and I move that each fellow tells honestly how he feels when he is going into battle; for instance, when the skirmishers are at work in front, and we know that the next two minutes will bring on the business.”
“Infernally bad,” growled Joe; “and anybody that pretends to feel otherwise lies.”
The postscript philosopher replied: “I never saw you show any fear, Joe.”
“That’s because I’m too big a coward to show it,” said Joe.
Even the two reticent mountaineers understood that.
One of them was moved to break the silence. At last he had, if not a thought, yet an emotion to stand sponsor for utterance.
“I always feel,” said he, “as though the squegees had took hold of my knees. There ain’t anything of me for about a minute—exceptin’ a spot in the small of my back. I always wish I was a woman or a baby, or dead or something like that. After a while I git holt of myself and I says to myself, ‘Bill, you’ve got to stand up to the rack, fodder or no fodder.’ After that it all comes sort of easy like, you know, because the firin’ begins, and after the firin’ begins you’re doin’ somethin’, you see, and when you’re fightin’ like, things don’t seem so bad. I s’pose you’ve all noticed that.”
From Joe: “In all the works on psychology it has been recognized as a universal principle, that the mind when occupied with a superior consideration is able to free itself from considerations of a lesser sort.”
The mountaineer looked at him helplessly and said nothing.
The postscript philosopher began: “I shall never forget my first battle. It wasn’t much of a battle either, but it was lively while it lasted. Unfortunately for me it was one of those fights where you have to wait for the enemy to begin. I was tender then. I had just left home, and every time I looked at the little knickknacks mother and the girls had given me to make camp life comfortable,—for bless my soul they thought we lived in camp,—every time I looked at these things I grew teary. There oughtn’t to be any bric-à-brac of that kind given to a fellow when he goes into the army. It isn’t fit. It worries him.”
He was silent for a minute. So were the rest of us. We all had bric-à-brac to remember. He resumed:
“We were lying there in the edge of a piece of woods with a sloping meadow in front, crossed by a stone wall heavily overgrown with vines. At the other edge of the meadow was another strip of woods. The enemy were somewhere in there. We knew they were coming, because the pickets had been driven in, and we stood there waiting for them. The waiting was the worst of it, and as we waited I got to feeling in my pockets and—pulled out a little, old three-cornered pincushion. Conscience knows I wouldn’t have pulled out that pincushion at that particular minute to have won a battle. I’ve got it now. I never had any use for a pincushion because I never could pin any two things together the way a woman can, but a man can’t make his womenkind believe that: I’ve kept it all through the war, and when I go back home—if it suits the Yankees that I ever go back at all—I’m going to give it as a souvenir to the little sister that made it for me. And I’m going to tell her that it was that pincushion, little three-cornered thing that it is, that made a man out of me that day.
“My first thought as I pulled it out was that I wanted to go home and give the war up; but then came another kind of a thought. I said, ‘The little girl wouldn’t have given that pincushion to me if she hadn’t understood that I was going off to fight for the country.’ So I said to myself, ‘Old boy, you’ve got to stand your hand pat.’ And now whenever we go into battle I always brace myself up a little by feeling in my breeches pocket and sort of shaping out that pincushion.”
From Joe: “It’s a good story, but the rest of us haven’t any pincushions. Besides that, it’s raining.” I couldn’t help observing that Joe drew that afternoon’s letter out of his pocket and fumbled it a little, while the long-legged mountaineer was straightening out his limbs and his thoughts for his share in the conversation. He said in basso profundo: “The fact is I’m always so skeered just before a fight that I can’t remember afterwards how I did feel. I know only this much, that that last three minutes before the bullets begin to whistle and the shells to howl, takes more out of me than six hours straightaway fightin’ afterwards does.”
From Joe: “There must be a lot in you at the start, then.”
There were still two men unheard from in the experience meeting. Some one of us called upon them for an expression of opinion.
“I donno. I never thought,” said one.
“Nuther did I,” said the other.
“Of course you didn’t,” said Joe.
Then the postscript philosopher, rising and stretching himself, remarked: “I reckon that if any man goes into a fight without being scared, that man is drunk or crazy.”
Then we all lay down and went to sleep.