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Officers have the right of resigning, and some of them have the habit of skulking, I have heard. I will bet my best bonnet against your old worn-out slippers there, that if ever brought to the test your shoulder-strapped cousin would do one or the other! Besides " and here she paused. "Well, what is the 'besides'?" asked the young man, a little impatiently.
And yet through every corridor of the leading houses at Niagara, in every parlor, on every walk and on every piazza, sat, stood, walked, read, smoked or flirted, the blue-clothed, buttoned, shoulder-strapped, jaunty-capped, natty-whiskered and killingly-moustached officers of the Union army, who had sworn to serve the country and aid to defend the republic, but who paid no more attention to the pleading call of the generals in the field or the authoritative voice of the President, than they would have done to a blind piper playing in the street!
I could have kicked the shoulder-strapped coward or traitor, may be both, but if I had, old Pigeon-hole would have had a military execution for the benefit of the Volunteers in short order. And then he strutted, talking treason and squirting tobacco juice and all the while our Government supporting the scoundrel.
Alas! the question has been continually asked and never answered. "Leipsic was lost, and I not there!" cried the soldier of the old French Eleventh, bursting into tears. But: "All the great battles of this war have been fought, and I have managed to keep out of them!" might the shoulder-strapped, belted, fatigue-capped, strutting mock-soldier of our own time say with a corresponding chuckle.
As it grew nearer ten, able-bodied, bright-looking officers, Regulars, as I was told, educated at Uncle Sam's expense to fight, elegantly shoulder-strapped, passed in to drive quills in a quiet department, 'remote from death's alarms, and I wondered if some spirited clerks and schoolmasters that I knew, who would have been willing to have gone bent double under knapsacks, if the Surgeon would have accepted them, would not have performed the duty better, and have permitted the country to have the benefit of the military education of these gentlemen."
"Whereas, We have been treated by the officers of the aforesaid boat more like animals than human beings, in being deprived of luxuries to which we have been accustomed, have been driven from the public dining-table, driven from our beds at the dead hour of night, that shoulder-strapped officers might be made comfortable, and kicked down stairs, therefore, be it
"He's got one o' these self-acting mouths, with a perpetual-motion attachment. He don't do anything but talk, and mostly bad. Blame him, it's his fault that we're kept here, instead of being sent to the front, as we ought to be. Wish somebody'd shoot him." The Provost-Marshal was found in his office, dealing out sentences like a shoulder-strapped Rhadamanthes.
In such an interlude as this the listener might almost have lulled himself into the fancy that, after all, there was no war; that these courteous, gray-coated, shoulder-strapped gentlemen were not at present engaged in the business of killing their fellowmen; that this building wherein we sat, with its florid velvet carpets underfoot and its too-heavy chandeliers overhead, was not the captured chateau of the governor of a French province; and that the deep-eyed, white-fleeced, bull-voiced old man who sat just opposite was not the commander of sundry hundreds of thousands of fighting men with guns in their hands, but surely was no more and no less than the elderly lord of the manor, who, having a fancy for regimentals, had put on his and had pinned some glittering baubles on his coat and then had invited a few of his friends and neighbors in for a simple dinner on this fine evening of the young autumn.
"'Yes, sir, if the Court please, retorted the Colonel indignantly, then remembering how this same Judge Advocate had upon former occasions affected to despise privates, he added: 'His character and credibility are quite as good as those of half the shoulder-strapped gentry of the Corps.
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