It may confidently be averred that from all vital chaos a new lathed and plastered order is ever shaping itself and emerging; this is as certain as that everybody is greater than anybody, and that discipline is always brought forth by a Cæsarian operation from anarchy. So from this sour animal effervescence of insurrection miraculously unravels at last, scathless and satisfied, a melancholy sextette of curbed and baffled penitents. They are awkward, divergent, unassimilated, to begin with, and must be pounded and kicked and cursed into homogeneity later on, but they are uproariously recalcitrant thenceforth never more.
The Mule recruit has thus rapidly developed into the Mule soldier. He has been summarily mustered in, with a rope around his lower lip rasping it to rawness, but without any very searching inquiries as to his uncertain age, his wholly immaterial sex, his superfluous name, or his complicated social status.
He has been blacksmithed as to hoof (much against his will), and veterinaried as to shoulder. He must now march forth in the name of the Union and emancipation, but must first be introduced to his commander--and so must you, my beloved. Ye who have blushes to blush for your species, prepare to blush them now, and then proceed to bury Cæsar, not to praise him.
The army teamster may be safely diagnosed as a chronic malady of war times. With such rare and radiant exceptions as the immortal nominee of the Seattle caucus, who carried a hare-lip and a pure heart, he was a pestilent metaplasm. He was a product of heterogeneous aggregation and the survival of misfits. His status was fixed in earliest infancy; when he was vaccinated, the doctor is suspected of having thrown away the child and saved the virus capsule. He professed no patriotism; he pretended to no bravery; he cherished no martial ambitions. He had no desire to fight. There was no need of an order to show cause why a temporary injunction should not issue restraining him from carnage.
When his slim sweetheart, the dove-eyed, flat-chested maiden at Onion creek, a stuttering siren to be courted only on the installment plan, sent him to the field, it was with full assurance that he was not lost to her forever--not he! The corn-fed, lank Delilah shrewdly guessed that her prudent wooer would listen to battle's dissonant thunders from posts of distant security, and come back unshot, unsabred, but covered with vicarious glory, which he did. Heaven is merciful to the idiotic and kind to the cautious. His previous occupations had varied from cord-wood carpentry to slaughter-house surgery, and he had always been disposed to shed perspiration with extreme diffidence. He was mostly red-headed. He had been addicted to excess of raw spirits, tobacco and other abominations--loving these, his enemies, with a fine, magnanimous, scriptural, discrimination. He may be relied on to fill a drunkard's grave some day, probably without even asking the drunkard's permission; such are his knavish proclivities. His eye was aglare with hate, every glance a stab. His occasional smile ran through all the gamut of grins, from the smirk of conceit to the simper of toadyism. He had a torpid liver and was no trustee of beauty. His physical development was surprising; even an Englishman never saw anything equal to it--outside of England. He was strong as the Kansas zephyr that carried an anvil ten miles and came back next morning after the hammer. Freckles were his trade-mark and profanity was the staunch, infallible test of his identity. Huge quadrilateral oaths, shingled with brimstone and fringed with fire, were the soft relaxations of his happier hours. Blue, blistering maledictions, flecked with white foam, marked the approach of his paroxysmal frenzies, and no postponement on account of the weather.