And about half an hour later the miracle happened again. Amazing!
Chuck and his father caught the eight-oh-six out of Butler the next morning and were back that same afternoon - Chuck sworn in and assigned to the same company (C company, 2nd regiment) Tom was in, and with similar delay time. So Chuck and I went to another (fairly) safe spot, and I told him goodbye again, and again the miracle overtook me.
No, I did not decide I was in love with him, after all. Enough men had had me by then that I was not inclined to mistake a hearty orgasm for eternal love. But it was nice that they happened since I intended to tell Chuck goodbye as often and as emphatically as possible, come what may. And did, right up to the day, a week later, when it really was goodbye.
Chuck never came back. No, he was not killed in action; he never got out of Chickamauga Park, Georgia. It was the fever, whether malaria or yellow jack, I'm not sure. Or it could have been typhoid. Five times as many died of the fevers as were lost in combat. They are heroes, too. Well, aren't they? They volunteered; they were willing to fight... and they wouldn't have caught the fever if they had hung back, refused to answer the call.
I've got to drag out that soap box again. All during the twentieth century I've run into people who have either never heard of the War of 1898, or they belittle it. ‘Oh, you mean that one. That wasn't a real war, just a skirmish. What happened? Did he stub his toe, running back down San Juan hill?'
(I should have killed them! I did throw an extra dry martini into the eyes of one man who talked that way.)
Casualties are just as heavy in one war as in another... because death comes just once to the customer.
And besides... In the summer of 1898 we did not know that the war would be over quickly. The United States was not a superpower; the United States was not a world power of any sort... whereas Spain was still a great empire. For all we knew our men might be gone for years... or not come back. The bloody tragedy of 1861-65 was all we had to go by, and that had started just like this one, with the President calling for a few militiamen. My elders tell me that no one dreamed that the rebel states, half as big and less than half as populous and totally lacking in the heavy industry on which modern war rests - no sensible person dreamed that they could hold out for four long, dreary, death-laden years.
With that behind us, we did not assume that beating Spain would be easy or quick; we just prayed that our men would come back... some day.
The day came, 5 May, when our men left... on a special troop train, down from Kansas City, a swing over to Springfield, then up to St Louis, and east - destination Georgia. All of us went over to Butler, Mother and Father in the lead, in his buggy, drawn by Loafer, while the rest of us followed in the surrey, ordinarily used only on Sundays, with Tom driving Daisy and Beau. The train pulled in, and we made hurried goodbyes as they were already shouting ‘All abo... ard!' Father turned Loafer over to Frank, and I inherited the surrey with the gentle team.
They didn't actually pull out all that quickly; baggage and freight had to be loaded as well as soldiers. There was a flat car in the middle of the train, with a brass band on it, supplied by the 3rd regiment (Kansas City) and it played all the time the train was stopped, a military medley.
They played ‘Mine eyes have seen the glory...' and segued right into ‘I wish I was in de land of cotton' and from that into ‘Tenting tonight, tenting tonight' and ‘- stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni!' Then they played ‘In my prison cel I sit' and the engine gave a toot and the train started to move, and the band scrambled to get off the flat car into the coach next to it, and the man with the tuba had to be helped.
And we started home and I was still hearing ‘Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are marching' and that tragic first line, In my prison cell I sit...' Somebody told me later that the man who wrote that knew nothing about it, because wartime prison camps don't have anything as luxurious as cells. He cited Andersonville.
As may be, it was enough to make my eyes blur up and I couldn't see. But that didn't matter; Beau Brummel and Daisy needed no help from me. Just leave the reins slack and they would take us home. And they did.
I helped Frank unharness both rigs, then went in and upstairs. Mother came to my room just as I closed the door, and tapped on it. I opened it.
‘Yes, Mother?'
‘Maureen, your Golden Treasury - May I borrow it?'
‘Certainly. ‘I went and got it; it was under my pillow. I handed it to her. ‘It's number eighty-three, Mother, on page sixty.'
She looked surprised, then thumbed the pages. ‘So it is,' she agreed, then looked up. ‘We must be brave, dear.'
‘Yes, Mother. We must.'
Speaking of prison cells, Pixel has just arrived in mine, with a present for me. A mouse. A dead mouse. Still warm. He is so pleased with himself and clearly he expects me to eat it. He is waiting for me to eat it.
How am I going to get out of this?
Chapter 6 - ‘When Johnny Comes Marching Home...'
The rest of 1898 was one long bad dream. Our men had gone to war but it was difficult to find out what was happening. I remember a time, sixty-odd years later, when the malevolent eye of television turned war into a spectator sport, even to the extent (I hope that this is not true!) that attacks were timed so that the action could be shown live on the evening news. Can you imagine a more ironically horrible way to die than to have one's death timed to allow an anchor man to comment on it just before turning the screen over to the beer ads?
In 1898 the fighting was not brought live into our livingrooms; we had trouble finding out what had happened even long after the fact. Was our Navy guarding the east coast (as eastern politicians were demanding), or was it somewhere in the Caribbean? Had the Oregon rounded the Horn and would it reach the Fleet in time? Why was there a second battle at Manila? Hadn't we won the battle of Manila Bay weeks ago?
In 1898 I knew so little about military matters that I did not realise that civilians should not know the location of a fleet or the planned movements of an army. I did not know that anything known to an outsider will be known by enemy agents just minutes later. I had never heard of the public's ‘right to know', a right that cannot be found in the Constitution but was sacrosanct in the second half of the twentieth century. This so-called ‘right' meant that tr was satisfactory (regrettable perhaps but necessary) for soldiers and sailors and airmen to die in order to preserve unblemished that sacred ‘right to know'.
I had still to learn that neither Congressmen nor newsmen could be trusted with the lives of our men.
Let me try to be fair. Let us assume that over ninety per cent of Congressmen and newsmen are honest and honourable men. In that case, less than ten per cent need be murderous fools indifferent to the deaths of heroes for that minority to destroy lives, lose battles, turn the course of a war.
I did not have these grim thoughts in 1898; it would take the War of 1898 and two world wars and two undeclared wars (‘police actions' for God's sake!) to make me realise that neither our government nor our press could be trusted with human lives.
‘A democracy works well only when the common man is an aristocrat. But God must hate the common man; He has made him so dadblamed common! Does your common man understand chivalry? Noblesse oblige? Aristocratic rules of conduct? Personal responsibility for the welfare of the State? One may as well search for fur on a frog.' Is that something I heard my father say? No. Well, not exactly. It is something I recall from about two o'clock in the morning in the Oyster Bar of the Renton House in Kansas City after Mr Clemens' lecture in January 1898. Maybe my father said part of it; perhaps Mr Clemens said all of it, or perhaps they shared it - my memory is not perfect after so many years.