The Scouts of Stonewall: The Story of the Great Valley Campaign by Altsheler (the false prince series TXT) 📗

dream. There were lots of other beautiful girls there dancing with fellows like myself, and the roses were everywhere, and the music rose and fell like the song of angels, and I was so happy and—I awoke to find myself here on a hillside with a ragged army that's been marching and fighting for days and weeks, and which, for all I know, will keep it up for years and years longer.”

“I've a piece of advice for you, Arthur,” said Langdon.

“What is it?”

“Quit dreaming. It's a bad habit, especially when you're in war. The dream is sure to be better than the real thing. You won't be dancing again in Charleston for a long time, nor will I. All those beautiful girls you were dreaming about but couldn't name will be without partners until we're a lot older than we are now.”

Langdon spoke with a seriousness very uncommon in him, and lay back again on the ground, where he began to chew a grass stem meditatively.

“Go back to sleep, boys, you'll need it,” said Harry lightly. “Our next march is to be a thousand miles, and we're to have a battle at every milestone.”

“You mean that as a joke, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if it came true,” said Langdon, as he closed his eyes again.

Harry went on and found the two colonels sitting in the shadow of a stone fence. One of them had his arm in a sling, but he assured Harry the wound was slight. They gave him a glad and paternal welcome.

“In the kind of campaign we're waging,” said Colonel Leonidas Talbot, “I assume that anybody is dead until I see him alive. Am I not right, eh, Hector?”

“Assuredly you're right, Leonidas,” replied Lieutenant-Colonel Hector St. Hilaire. “Our young men don't get frightened because they don't have time to think about it. Before we can get excited over the battle in which we are engaged we've begun the next one. It is also a matter of personal pride to me that one of the best bodies of troops in the service of General Jackson is of French descent like myself.”

“The Acadians, colonel,” said Harry. “Grand troops they are.”

“It is the French fighting blood,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Hector St. Hilaire, with a little trace of the grandiloquent in his tone. “Slurs have been cast at the race from which I sprang since the rout and flight at Waterloo, but how undeserved they are! The French have burned more gunpowder and have won more great battles without the help of allies than any other nation in Europe. And their descendants in North America have shown their valor all the way from Quebec to New Orleans, although we are widely separated now, and scarcely know the speech of one another.”

“It's true, Hector,” said Colonel Leonidas Talbot. “I think I've heard you say as much before, but it will bear repeating. Do you think, Hector, that you happen to have about you a cigarette that has survived the campaign?”

“Several of them, Leonidas. Here, help yourself. Harry, I would offer one to you, but I do not recommend the cigarette to the young. You don't smoke! So much the better. It's a bad habit, permissible only to the old. Leonidas, do you happen to have a match?”

“Yes, Hector, I made sure about that before I asked you for the cigarettes. Be careful when you light it. There is only one match for the cigarettes of both.”

“I'll bring you a coal from one of the campfires,” said Harry, springing up.

But Lieutenant-Colonel Hector St. Hilaire waved him down courteously, though rather reprovingly.

“You would never fire a cannon shot to kill a butterfly,” he said, “and neither will I ever light a delicate cigarette with a huge, shapeless coal from a campfire. It would be an insult to the cigarette, and after such an outrage I could never draw a particle of flavor from it. No, Harry, we thank you, you mean well, but we can do it better.”

Harry sat down again. The two colonels, who had been through days of continuous marching and fighting, knelt in the lee of the fence, and Lieutenant-Colonel Hector St. Hilaire also shaded the operation with his hat as an additional protection. Colonel Leonidas Talbot carefully struck the match. The flame sputtered up and his friend brought his hat closer to protect it. Then both lighted their cigarettes, settled back against the fence, and a deep peace appeared upon their two faces.

“Hector,” said Colonel Talbot, “only we old soldiers know how little it takes to make a man happy.”

“You speak truly, Leonidas. In the last analysis it's a mere matter of food, clothes and shelter, with perhaps a cigarette or two. In Mexico, when we advanced from Vera Cruz to the capital, it was often very cold on the mountains. I can remember coming in from some battle, aching with weariness and cold, but after I had eaten good food and basked half an hour before a fire I would feel as if I owned the earth. Physical comfort, carried to the very highest degree, produces mental comfort also.”

“Sound words, Hector. The starved, the cold and the shelterless can never be happy. God knows that I am no advocate of war, although it is my trade. It is a terrible thing for people to kill one another, but it does grind you down to the essentials. Because it is war you and I have an acute sense of luxury, lying here against a stone fence, smoking a couple of cigarettes.”

“That is, Leonidas, we are happy when we have attained what we have needed a long time, and which we have been a long time without. It has occurred to me that the cave-man, in all his primitive nakedness, must have had some thrilling moments, moments of pleasures of the body, the mind and the imagination allied, which we modern beings cannot feel.”

“To what moments do you allude, Hector?”

“Suppose that he has just eluded a monstrous saber-toothed tiger, and has slipped into his cave by the opening, entirely too small for any great beast of prey. He is in his home. A warm fire is burning on a flat stone. His wife—beautiful to him—is cooking savory meats for him. Around the walls are his arms and their supplies. They eat placidly while the huge tiger from which he has escaped by a foot or less roars and glowers without. The contrast between the danger and that house, which is the equivalent to a modern palace, comes home to him with a thrill more keen and penetrating than anything we can ever feel.

“The man and his wife eat their evening meal, and retire to their bed of dry leaves in the corner. They fall asleep while the frenzied and ferocious tiger is still snarling and growling. They know he cannot get at them, and his gnashings and roarings are merely a lullaby, soothing them to the sweetest of slumbers. You could not duplicate that in the age in which we live, Leonidas.”

“No, Hector, we couldn't. But, as for me, I can spare such thrills. It seems to me that we have plenty of danger of our own just now. I must say, however, that you put these matters in a fine, poetic way. Have you ever