CHAPTER XV

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A PEEP AT CAMP LYON AND THE TWO HUNDREDTH REGIMENT--DISCIPLINE AND THE DICE-BOX--HOW SEVEN HUNDRED MEN CAN BE SQUEEZED INTO THREE.

"I am going to West Falls again in a few days--that is, if we do not get orders for Washington," Colonel Egbert Crawford said, speaking to his cousin, a few chapters back, as may be remembered. By which he meant, of course, if he meant anything, that the Two Hundredth Regiment, with the raising of which he had been charged by Major-General Governor Morgan, was in a high state of discipline as well as fully up to the maximum in numbers, and burning to go down to the field of carnage and revenge the deaths of those foully slaughtered by rebel hands.

It may be interesting to know exactly what _was_ the condition of the Two Hundredth Regiment, at that exact time--how many it numbered--what was its proficiency in drill--what was the appearance of the camp at which it was quartered--and how laboriously Colonel Crawford was engaged in bringing it up to the highest standard of perfection for citizen soldiery. For this purpose, it will be well to look in at the encampment, with the eyes of some persons from the city who visited it on Sunday the 29th of June--the very day on which McClellan, from sheer lack of troops, abandoned the White House, necessarily destroying so much valuable property, losing for the time the last hope of the capture of Richmond, and falling back on the line of the James River.

The Two Hundredth Regiment lay at "Camp Lyon," (as it may be designated for the purposes of this chronicle)--a locality on Long Island, a few miles eastward from the City Hall of Brooklyn, and easily accessible by one of the lines of horse-cars running from Fulton Ferry. It had been some two months established; recruiting for the regiment was said to be going on very rapidly; "only a few more men wanted" was the burden of the song sung in the advertising columns of the morning papers; rations for some seven hundred men were continually furnished for it, by the Quartermaster's Department; the Colonel made flattering reports of it every day or two, to the higher military authorities in the city, and at least once a week to the still higher authorities at Albany; and a political Brigadier-General was reported to have gone down and reviewed it, once or twice, coming back eminently satisfied with its numbers, discipline and performances.

The visitors from the city, who, having no other connection whatever with the progress of this story, may be fobbed off with the very ordinary names of Smith and Brown,--reached the camp at about four o'clock on that Sunday afternoon, having waited until that late hour in the day for the purpose of avoiding the noon-tide heat, and being anxious to be present at the evening drill, which was supposed to take place in the neighborhood of six o'clock. An acquaintance of theirs, an officer in the Two Hundredth, one Lieutenant Woodruff, had several times invited them to "run down to camp and see him before he went away," promising to do the honors of the encampment in the best manner compatible with the duties of a "fellow busy all the time, you know."

Alighting from the vehicle, Smith and Brown found the camp stretching before them, scarcely so picturesque as they had anticipated, but with enough of the military air about its green sod and conical tents, to make it rather varied and pleasing to a couple of "cits" who had not looked upon the extended army pageant around Washington, or seen anything more of war than could be observed in a turn-out of the First Division on the Fourth of July. On a broad level, stretching back for a quarter of a mile from the railroad-track, and terminating in a strip of noble oak woods, the tents of the encampment were pitched, forty or fifty in number, not too white and cleanly-looking, even at a distance, and decidedly dingy and yellow when brought to a nearer view. Some attempt had been made at forming them into lines, with regular alleys between; the hospital-tent at some distance in the rear, distinguished by a yellow flag hanging listlessly from a pole in front; and the Colonel's large round tent or marquee prominent in the centre, a small American flag before it, doing its best to wave in the slight sea air that came in over the Long Island hills. Groups of soldiers, variously disposed, dotted the space between the tents or sat at the doors, chatting with male or female civilians, or their own wives and daughters, who had run down to see them as an amusement for Sunday afternoon; while sentinels paced backward and forward along certain lines and offered an uncertain amount of inconvenience to those who wished to traverse the camp-grounds in one direction or another.

Smith and Brown, looking for Woodruff and finding it a matter of some difficulty to discover him, paced up and down among the tents, wherever the sentinels permitted, looking in at the doors of those canvas cottages and observing the humors which denoted that the occupants had been the possessors of plenty of time for other purposes than drill, however proficient they might have become in that military necessity. Scarcely one of the alleys between the rows of tents but had its street-name, stuck up on a piece of chalked or charcoaled board at the entrance--from the ambitious "Broadway" to the aristocratic "Fifth Avenue" and the doubtful "Mercer Street." Many of the tents bore equally significant inscription, from the "City Hall" (where some scion of an alderman probably made his warlike abode), to the "Astor House" and "St. Nicholas" (where perhaps some depreciated son of snobbery was known to have his quarters), and the "Hotel de Coffee and Cakes," suggestive of inmates from the less pretentious precincts of the city. Within the tents, as Smith and Brown took the liberty of looking in, a variety of spectacles were discovered. Straw seemed to be an almost universal commodity--quite as indispensable there as in pigpens or railroad-cars; and next to straw, perhaps battered trunks and very cheap pine tables predominated. Greasy kettles and dishes could be discovered just under the flap of the tent, in many instances; and here and there a tent would be passed, emitting odors of rancid grease, stale tobacco and personal foulness, not at all appetizing to visitors unfamiliar with the gutters of Mackerelville or the hold of a ship in the horse-latitudes.

In some of the tents the men were asleep on the tables, in others on the trunks, in still others on the straw. In a few Smith and Brown saw soldiers drinking; in others, in positions suggestive of being very drunk, had they found them elsewhere than in a well-regulated camp; in still others playing cards for pennies, furtively behind the flaps of the tent or openly in the vicinity of the door. They caught fragments of broad oaths from a few, and snatches of obscene stories from a few others; and taken altogether, the impression of the Two Hundredth being in a high state of discipline or a very excellent sanitary condition, was not strongly forced upon their minds. This impression was not strengthened, when, being directed by one of the sentries to the hospital-tent as a place where they might be likely at that moment to find Lieutenant Woodruff,--they failed to discover him there, but did not fail to discover one corporal keeping guard in that sanitary domicil, so drunk that he was asleep and so drunkenly abusive when they woke him that they were glad to permit him to fall back again into his beastly slumber.

At length they found Lieutenant Woodruff, who had just returned from escorting another party of friends to the cars, on their way back to town. He seemed glad to see them, though not enthusiastic in his demonstrations--invited them to the tent in which he messed with some brother officers--and they took that direction for a rest after their hot promenade.

Somewhat to the apparent mortification of Woodruff, when they reached the tent none of the brother officers to whom he had promised to introduce his friends, were to be found; but they had left their traces behind them. Two or three empty bottles and as many uncleaned glasses lay about the table, and the remains of spilt liquor wetted and stained the boards of the seats, while a very dirty pack of cards, half on the table and the remainder on the ground, showed that the officers were not only a little unscrupulous as to the character of their Sunday amusements, but equally indifferent as to the cleanliness of the tools with which they performed the arduous labors of old-sledge, euchre and division-loo. Woodruff cleared away the debris from the table, and flung it into one corner with some petulance which did not escape the notice of his visitors. Finally part of a box of bad cigars was introduced, and among the fumes engendered by those indispensable "weeds," a little conversation followed.

"Well, when do you get off?" asked Smith, who had been very anxious to come on that Sunday, instead of waiting for the next, under the impression that the regiment might move at any time and thus deprive them of the visit. He had been led to suppose so, partially from conversations with Woodruff in the city, and partially by the statements in the newspapers, before alluded to, made with reference to this and other "favorite regiments."

"Get off!" answered Woodruff, with no concealment of the vexation in his tone. "Humph! well, I think we shall need to get on a little faster, before we get off at all!"

"Not full yet, eh?" asked Brown.

"Not _exactly_," was the answer of the Lieutenant, with a satirical emphasis on the second word which indicated that some other would have been quite as well in place.

"Why, I thought you were!" said Smith. "The papers had you up to seven hundred some time ago, and with all your big posters and advertisements and the large bounties offered, you ought to be bringing them in very rapidly."

"Yes, I suppose so!" answered Woodruff. "We _ought_ to do a good many things in this world, that we do not find it convenient to do. We _ought_ to have been full, and off to Washington, a month ago, and would have been, if there had been any management."

"Why you speak as if you were discouraged and dissatisfied," said Brown, "and not at all as you talked to us when in the city a few days ago."

"No, probably not," answered the Lieutenant. "Well, the fact is, boys, that I have been lying to you like--(and here he used a very hard word not necessary to be recorded.) We have _all_ been lying; but to you, at least, I mean to make a clean breast of it. I did not suppose you would come down, and while you kept at a distance I thought we might as well keep up a good reputation. Now that you are here, you have not half an eye if you do not know that 'Camp Lyon' is a humbug, and that there is no discipline or anything else in it that _should_ be here. I am going to get out of it, if I can with any honor."

"What is the matter?" asked Smith, very much disappointed, and very much discouraged at the key which the situation of Camp Lyon seemed to offer to the corresponding situation of many others of the crack recruiting stations depended upon for filling up the reduced ranks of the army.

"What is the matter? Everything!" said Woodruff, fairly launched out in an exposure of the abuses of the recruiting service, for which he had not before had a fair and _safe_ opportunity. "Half the men are good for nothing, and almost all the officers worse. We could get along with worthless _men_, and perhaps make soldiers of them, if we only had officers worth their salt. Field or line, there is not one in three that knows when a 'shoulder-arms' is correctly made; and there is no more attempt at either study or practice than there would be if we were a hunting party encamped in the Northern woods. Commissions have been issued to anybody supposed to possess some political influence; and subordinate commissions have been promised by the higher officers to any one who offered to bring in a certain number of rapscallions or pay down a certain sum of money. Those who are not drunken, are lazy; and the men know about as much of wholesome discipline as a hog knows of holy-water. I have tried to do a little better with some of the squads of my own company; but I think that complaints have been made that I 'overworked' the men, and I have fallen into decidedly bad odor with the good people up at the big house yonder."

"And who are _they_?" asked Brown, wofully ignorant of the details of recruiting in 1862. "And what are they doing up at the 'big house,' as you call it?"

"Eh? you haven't been in there, have you?" said Woodruff. "Come along then, and see. Of course you know that I must refer to our gallant Colonel and the other leading officers at the head of the regiment; and of course you are not so green as not to know that the big house beyond the railroad track, there, is a tavern. Come along and let us see what Colonel Crawford and the rest of them happen to be doing; and by the time that is over we shall have our 'evening parade,' which you must certainly see before you go home."

Escorted by the Lieutenant, the two citizens took their way to the "big house"--a hotel standing on the north side of the railroad track and very near it--a wooden building of two stories, with a piazza in front and at the east end, and flanked by a row of horse-sheds indicating that there was some dependence made upon the patronage of fast drivers stopping there on race days or when trotting was peculiarly good on the pike or the plank. Before the house paced two sentries, with muskets at the shoulder, though what they were guarding was not so clear, as every one passed who wished to do so, whether in uniform or citizen's dress. Behind the corner of the piazza, eastward, an officer was leaning back in his chair against the clap-boards, with his hat over his eyes and apparently asleep; and a few feet from him a sergeant, distinguishable by three dingy stripes on his arm that should have been laid upon his back, was toying, not too decently, with a woman whose looks and manners both proclaimed her one of the "necessary evils" of a modern community.

"Do they allow such actions as that--right here in public, and in the very presence of the officers?" asked Smith, whose education had possibly been a little neglected in some other particulars, as Brown's had been in the details of the military profession.

"Guess so!" was the significant reply of Woodruff. "Come up stairs!" and the party passed on. As they did so, they looked through a door to the left, and saw a bar of unplaned boards extending the whole length of a spacious room, with half a dozen attendants behind it and as many beer kegs and whiskey decanters pouring out their contents. Mingled with here and there a civilian, the whole front of the bar was full of soldiers, all apparently drinking, and drinking again, and drinking yet again, nibbling cheese, crackers and smoked-beef meanwhile, apparently to keep up the necessary thirst. "Fire and fall back!" seemed to be a military axiom not always observed by the rank and file of the Two Hundredth, as many of them kept their places and went on with their guzzling, with a determination worthy of a much better cause. But it was occasionally observed, after all, for there were a few who had been overcome by the heat of the bibulatory conflict, and who had relapsed into partial helplessness in chairs around the walls; and there were others who began to stagger and talk thickly at the counter, growing obscure and maudlin in their oaths, and shaking hands altogether too often, indicating the sleepy stage as very soon to follow.

As the two friends and their conductor passed up-stairs, they noticed two officers in somewhat loud conversation, not far from the landing and near the door of a side-room, on the handle of the door of which one of them held his hand a portion of the time. Without any effort, some of the words of their conversation could easily be heard; and Smith and Brown, who had no more than the average of that creditable delicacy which hears nothing intended only for other ears, caught some words which will bear setting down here as affording an additional clue to the state of discipline.

"That," said Woodruff, giving Smith a nudge as they came to the head of the stairs, speaking in a low tone, and pointing to the taller of the two men, who stood with his side-face presented at the moment,--"that is Colonel Crawford; and the other, the shorter man, is Captain Lowndes, who has been recruiting for the regiment at the Park. If I was in better odor with the Colonel, I would introduce you; but come on."

Smith and Jones did _not_ "come on" at the instant, and what they caught from the two officers was the following:

"Not _one_ in a week?" asked the Colonel, in a tone mingling surprise and anger. "Not one? D--n it!"

"I am sorry to say, not one," was the reply of Captain Lowndes. "They nearly all sing the same tune, however."

"Well, it won't do for _us_, you know!" said the Colonel. "Another review, and by some officer who was not a d--d lawyer blockhead, might be awkward!" Colonel Crawford either forgot, at that moment, that he had any connection with the legal profession, or he chose to ignore the fact; and it is not to be supposed that his subordinate reminded him of it. "We must have a paragraph in the to-morrow morning," he went on, naming an influential daily, "giving the regiment another 'blow.' If it does not get us any recruits, it will at least make the thing look better at Albany. Hum--where's Dalton?"

"The Adjutant went to Boston yesterday," was the response of Lowndes. "Said he had business, though as he had a girl with him when he stepped on board the boat, I suspect his business was rather personal."

"D--n him!" muttered the Colonel, between his teeth. Then louder, to Lowndes: "I thought I told you to request him, if you saw him, not to leave the city again without permission from _me_! It seems you _have_ seen him; and why were my orders not obeyed?" The Colonel spoke now with great dignity, and drew himself up so that the eagles on his shoulder-straps were at least half an inch higher than when he was squatted down into easy position.

"Your orders _were_ obeyed," answered the Captain. "I _did_ tell him."

"And what did he say?" asked the Colonel, lifting his eyebrows with some appearance of interest.

"He said," replied the Captain, enunciating his words very clearly, as if he had no objection to their producing their full weight on his superior--"That Colonel Egbert Crawford might go to h-ll, and he would go to Boston."

"Did he?--d--n him!" said the Colonel, who seemed to have a small bottle of profanity lately uncorked, or one that he certainly was not in the habit of uncorking in the presence of those on whom he wished to produce a different impression.

"Yes he did," answered the Captain. "He said a little more. Perhaps you would like to have _that_, while I am at it?"

"That?--yes, out with the whole of it!" spoke the Colonel, with another oath which need not be recorded here as any additional seasoning.

"He took occasion to remark, where the lady who was with him could hear it," Lowndes went on--"that he didn't care a d--n for you, and that you dare not make a complaint against him at Albany, a bit more than you dare jump into a place that is even hotter than the weather is here to-day."

"Did he--the infernal hound!" broke out the Colonel, his dark brows literally corrugated with rage. "I'll teach him whether I _dare_ or not, before I am forty-eight hours older!" But either there _was_ something behind the curtain, or Colonel Egbert Crawford was a man of most angelic temper, for the moment after he broke out into a laugh that was not of the most musical order and said: "Oh, well--Dalton is a pretty good fellow, after all, and perhaps the next Adjutant would be a worse one for the regiment."

With these words Colonel Egbert Crawford passed into the side room by the door of which he had been standing, while Captain Lowndes touched his hat to him very slightly and went on to the larger room towards which the others were proceeding. As the Colonel swung back the door, Smith caught a very quick glance within, and saw a table, with bottles, a pack of cards, a couple of dice-boxes, and four or five persons seated, lounging and smoking. The party appeared to him as if they might have been interrupted in a little harmless Sunday afternoon amusement, and as if they were only waiting for the return of the Colonel to the room, to renew that amusement in a very pleasant and effective manner. That impression was not removed by his hearing, after he had passed through the open door into the other room, a suspicious sound like the rattling of dice and another sound very like the chinking of coin, proceeding from the smaller apartment.

Smith and Brown found very little in the officers' room, dignified by the name of "regimental headquarters," demanding particular record. There were two red pine tables set together and forming a counter, behind which the regimental officers were supposed to be located; and on the end of the tables nearest the front of the house was a small desk, with pigeon-holes, at which, by the same fiction, the Adjutant was supposed to be always sitting, performing the arduous duties of his office. Supported by nails in the ceiling were two flag-staffs, their butts shaped to fit the muzzles of short rifles, and from the upper end of each depending one of the "guidons" of the regiment, gorgeously blue in color and lettered in shaded gold--understood to be the gift of certain ladies who properly appreciated the talents and devotion of the officers and the hopeful prospects of the regiment under formation. Behind the tables was a mantel; and on it stood two decanters partially filled with liquor, a plate of crackers and another of cheese. A Lieutenant was seated at the Adjutant's desk, engaged in filling up blank leaves-of-absence for each in turn, of a disorderly crowd of twenty or thirty soldiers who pressed forward from the door to receive them. Two or three of this crowd presented former leaves, to have them extended. One of these was refused, the Lieutenant laboring under some sort of impression that a private who had been three weeks under enlistment, and absent all that time on leave, would not become very proficient in drill unless he spent at least one week at the encampment before marching. The wronged man did not appear to take the refusal very much to heart, however: he merely remarked to one of the others, loud enough for the Lieutenant to have heard if he had been very observant, that "he didn't care two cusses for the leave: he would go off when he liked and stay as long as he liked, and he should like to see anybody smart enough to stop him."

At the mantel, taking a quiet drink with half a dozen civilian friends who had been admitted behind the tables, stood a tall, soldierly-looking man, pointed out by Woodruff as Lieut. Colonel Burns. Unaccountably, he wore no straps on the shoulder, his blue blouse looking as if it was thrown on for use instead of show, and his whole demeanor that of a man who, if opportunity should only be given him, would be a soldier. He had his sword-belts at the waist, however, and also wore his sword, as if he had some indefinite idea that something would thereby be gained in an _appearance_ of efficiency for the regiment.

"Have you seen almost enough?" asked Lieutenant Woodruff, of the two citizens.

"Quite enough!" said both in a breath.

"Well, time is just up," said the Lieutenant. "And in good time comes the drum-beat for evening parade. Come along, and see what it is like. I must leave you, but you can see the display without me."

A couple of snare-drums were rattling somewhere among the tents, and the shrill notes of a light infantry bugle sounded. Lieut. Colonel Burns buckled his sword belts a little tighter and straightened himself to a soldierly bearing, as he left the room with his friends. A sergeant took down the guidons, and all, except the one Lieutenant at the desk and two or three soldiers who did not consider the call as of sufficient consequence, followed them down to the parade-ground in front of the camp. Col. Egbert Crawford seemed to be like the two or three soldiers named, and not to consider the call of consequence enough to demand any attention on his part; for he did not, at least during the stay of Smith and Brown, emerge from the privacy of the inner room or make any movement to superintend the "dress parade."

That "dress parade" completed the experience of Smith and Brown; and it completed, at the same time, their knowledge of the numbers and efficiency of the Two Hundredth Regiment that was "almost ready to march." In squads of from ten to twenty-five, the soldiers gathered from their slovenly tents, until the observers could count something more than two hundred. Then by squads and afterwards in what was intended as a "regimental formation," they went through a series of marchings, countermarchings and facings, with about the proficiency which would be shown by the same number of entirely raw recruits, and with the same proportion of the most obvious blunderings that used to be exhibited by the "slab-companies" at the "general trainings" or "general musters" in the country sections, when a lamentable caricature upon military spirit was kept up, in the years following the War of 1812.

Not a musket was to be seen in the hands of one of these men, except the few sentries. They "had not been furnished," as the explanation was sure to be given afterwards when the regiment was discovered to be an undisciplined mob! They would probably not be "furnished" until just at the moment when the regiment should be forced to move, and then they would be put into hands liable to be called on to use them in battle within a week--those hands knowing no more of the management of the deadly instrument of modern warfare, than so many Sioux or South Sea Islanders might have known of watch-making or extracting the cube-root.

And yet with these men, and in this manner, the armies of the republic were being recruited; and on the deeds in arms wrought by these men, possibly in the very first conflict into which they were rushed like huddled sheep, the eyes of the military nations of Europe were to be turned with anxious interest. They were to fight, too, against a race of men to whom deadly weapons had been familiar from childhood, and who would consequently make soldiers, to the full extent of their capability, with one-half the training which was to these Northern men an absolute necessity! Is it any wonder that we have occasionally met with a Bull Run or a Second Field of Manassas, with this shameful waste of our opportunities and our war-material?

Smith and Brown left "Camp Lyon," before the completion of the "dress parade," with a him consciousness of being painfully disenchanted in a very important particular.

"Do you know, Smith" said Brown, as they were rolling along in the car, homeward--"that I doubt whether there are three hundred men in that regiment, absentees and all--instead of seven hundred as the papers report?"

"Humph," said Smith, "it seems to be all a humbug together! But I wonder what becomes of the extra pay issued to seven hundred men, when there are only three hundred entitled to receive it? And I wonder what becomes of all the extra rations that are drawn for them every day? Somebody must be making something out of it--eh? I wonder if there are any more regiments in the same condition?"

"Probably!" said Brown. Whereupon the two citizens fell into a very deep and silent train of thought, leaving us no additional speech to record.

Other people than Smith, at about that time, felt like propounding the same queries as to the disposition of extra pay and rations. Some of those queries, which _have_ been propounded, have not yet been answered. When they are, if that happy period ever arrives, we may know something more of the channels and sluices through which the wealth of the richest nation on the globe has ebbed away, leaving such inconsiderable results to show for the expenditure.

And yet Colonel Egbert Crawford, visiting the city two hours afterwards, and dropping in at two or three favorite resorts of men who talked horse, war and politics, on his way to the house of his cousin,--bore himself bravely under his weight of uniform, and more than once threw in a pardonable boast over the services he was rendering the country, the sacrifices he was making, and the rapid growth and efficiency of the Two Hundredth Regiment.

"All brass is not fashioned and moulded in foundries, where men do swelter like to those standing in the flames of the fiery furnace," says an old writer, Arnold of Thorndean, "but much of it doth become shaped in the human countenance."

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