John McElroy - Si Klegg, Book 1

Everybody who was in that campaign remembers how terribly hot and dry everything was.

Si Klegg managed to keep up tolerably near the head of the column until camp was reached, but his shoulders were strained and blisters began to appear on his feet.

"That was a mighty tough pull, wasn't it?" he said to his chum as they spread their blankets on the dog-kennel and made some sort of a bed; "but I guess after a day or two we'll get so used to it that we won't mind it."

For a few days the 200th Ind. lay in camp, but one day there came an order for the regiment to march to Bardstown as rapidly as possible. A battle was imminent. The roads were dusty as ash-heaps, and though the pace was not three miles an hour, the boys' tongues were hanging out before they were out of sight of camp.

"I say, Captain, don't they never have resting spells in the army?" said Si.

"Not on a forced march," answered the Captain, who, having been in the first three months' service, was regarded as a veteran. "Push on, boys; they say that they'll want us before night." Another hour passed.

"Captain, I don't believe you can put a pin-point anywhere on my feet that ain't covered with a blister as big as a hen's egg," groaned Si.

"It's too bad, I know," answered the officer; "but you must go on. They say Morgan's cavalry are in our rear shooting down every straggler they can find."

Si saw the boys around him lightening their knapsacks. He abominated waste above all things, but there seemed no help for it, and, reaching into that receptacle that bore, down upon his aching shoulders like a glacier on a groundhog, he pulled out and tossed into the fence corner the educational works he had anticipated so much benefit from. The bottle of "No. 6" followed, and it seemed as if the knapsack was a ton lighter, but it yet weighed more than any stack of hay on the home farm.

A cloud of dust whirled up, and out of it appeared a galloping Aid.

"The General says that the 200th Ind. must push on much faster. The enemy is trying to get to the bridge ahead of them," he shouted as he dashed off in another cloud of dust.

A few shots were heard in the rear.

"Morgan's cavalry are shooting some more stragglers," shouted some one.

Si was getting desperate. He unrolled the counterpane and slashed it into strips with his bowie. "My mother made that with her own hands," he explained to a comrade, "and if I can't have the good of it no infernal rebel shall. He next slashed the boots up and threw them after the quilt, and then hobbled on to overtake the rest of his company.

"There's enough dry-goods and clothing lying along in the fence corners to supply a good-sized town," the Lieutenant-Colonel reported as he rode over the line of march in rear of the regiment.

The next day Si's feet felt as if there was a separate and individual jumping toothache in every sinew, muscle, tendon and toe-nail; but that didn't matter. With Bragg's infantry ahead and John Morgan's cavalry in the rear, the 200th Ind. had to go forward so long as the boys could put one foot before the other.

The unloading went on even more rapidly than the day before.

"My knapsack looks like an elephant had stept on it," Si said, as he ruefully regarded it in the evening.

"Show me one in the regiment that don't," answered his comrade.

Thenceforward everything seemed to conspire to teach Si how vain and superfluous were the things of this world. The first rain-storm soaked his cherished album until it fell to pieces, and his sister's portfolio did the same. He put the photographs in his blouse pocket and got along just as well. When he wanted to write he got paper from the sutler. A mule tramped on his fancy coffee-pot, and he found he could make quite as good coffee in a quart-cup. A wagon-wheel lan over his cherished frying-pan, and he melted an old canteen in two and made a lighter and handier pan out of one-half of it. He broke his bowie-knife prying the lid off a cracker-box. He piled his knapsack with the others one day when the regiment was ordered to strip them off for a charge, and neither he nor his comrades ever saw one of them again. He never attempted to replace it. He learned to roll up an extra pair of socks and a change of underclothing in his blanket, tie the ends of this together and throw it over his shoulder sash fashion. Then, with his socks drawn up over the bottoms of his pantaloons, three days' rations in his haversack and 40 rounds in his cartridgebox, he was ready to make his 30 miles a day in any direction he might be sent, and whip anything that he encountered on the road.

IN COMMON with every other young man who enlisted to defend the glorious Stars and Stripes, Si Klegg, of the 200th Ind., had a profound superstition concerning the bayonet. All the war literature he had ever read abounded in bloodcurdling descriptions of bayonet charges and hand-to-hand conflicts, in which bayonets were repeatedly thrust up to the shanks in the combatants' bodies just as he had put a pitch-fork into a bundle of hay. He had seen pictures of English regiments bristling with bayonets like a porcupine with quills, rushing toward French regiments which looked as prickly as a chestnut-bur, and in his ignorance he supposed that was the way fighting was done. Occasionally he would have qualms at the thought of how little his system was suited to have cold steel thrust through it promiscuous-like, but he comforted himself with the supposition that he would probably get used to it in time—"soldiers get used to almost anything, you know."

When the 200th Ind. drew its guns at Indianapolis he examined all the strange accouterments with interest, but gave most to the triangular bit of steel which writers who have never seen a battle make so important a weapon in deciding contests.

It had milk, molasses, or even applejack, for Si then was not a member of the Independent Order of Good Templars, of which society he is now an honored officer. Nothing could be nicer, when he was on picket, to bring buttermilk in from the neighboring farm-house to his chum Shorty, who stood post while he was gone.

Later in the service Si learned the inestimable value of coffee to the soldier on the march. Then he stript the cloth from his canteen, fastened the strand with bits of wire and made a fine coffee-pot of it. In the morning he would half fill it with the splendid coffee ihe Government furnished, fill it up with water and hang it from a bush or a stake over the fire, while he went ahead with his other culinary preparations. By the time these were finished he would have at least a quart of magnificent coffee that the cook of the Fifth Avenue could not surpass, and which would last him until the regiment halted in the afternoon.

The bully of the 200th took it into his thick head one day to try to "run over" Si. The latter had just filled his canteen, and the bully found that the momentum of three pints of water swung at arm's length by an angry boy was about equal to a mule's kick.

Just as he was beginning to properly appreciate his canteen, he learned a sharp lesson, that comes to all of us, as to how much "cussedness" there can be in the simplest things when they happen to go wrong. He went out one day and got a canteen of nice sweet milk, which he and "Shorty" Elliott heartily enjoyed. He hung the canteen upon the ridge-pole of the tent, and thought no more about it until the next day, when he came in from drill, and found the tent filled with an odor so vile that it made him cough.

"Why in thunder don't the Colonel send out a detail to find and bury that dead mule? It'll pizen the hull camp."

He had been in service just long enough to believe that the Colonel ought to look out for and attend to everything.