17 - Being a Boy by Charles Dudley Warner

Dive into Warners engaging and humor-filled memoir as he shares his experiences growing up on a farm in Charlemont, Massachusetts. Narrated by Mark Penfold, this podcast will transport you back to a simpler time and place.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Chapter seventeen of Being a Boy by Charles Dudley Warner.
This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by
Mark Penfold, chapter seventeen War. Every boy who is good
for anything is a natural savage. The scientists who want

(00:21):
to study the primitive man, and have so much difficulty
in finding one anywhere in this sophisticated age, couldn't do
better than to devote their attention to the common country boy.
He has the primal, vigorous instincts and impulses of the
African savage, without any of the vices inherited from a
civilization long ago decayed or developed in an unrestrained barbaric society.

(00:42):
You want to catch your boy young and study him
before he has either virtues or vices, in order to
understand the primitive man every New England boy desires or
did desire a generation ago before children were born, sophisticated
with a large library and with a word culture, rich
on their brows, to live by hunting, fishing, and war.

(01:04):
The military instinct, which is the special mark of barbarism,
is strong in him. It arises not alone from his
love of fighting. For the boy is naturally as cowardly
as the savage, but from his fondness for display, the
same that a corporal or a general feels in decking
himself in tinsel and tawdry colors and strutting about in
view of the female sex. Half the pleasure in going

(01:26):
out to murder another man with a gun would be
wanting if one did not wear feathers and gold lace
and stripes on his pantaloons. The law also takes this
view of it, and will not permit men to shoot
each other in plain clothes. And the world also makes
some curious distinctions in the art of killing. To kill
people with arrows is barbarous. To kill them with smooth

(01:47):
boares and flintlock muskets is semi civilized. To kill them
with breech loading rifles is civilized. That nation is the
most civilized, which has the appliances to kill the most
of another nation in the shortest time. This is the
result of six thousand years of constant civilization. By and
by when the nations cease to be boys, perhaps they

(02:08):
will not want to kill each other at all. Some
people think the world is very old, but here is
an evidence that it is very young, and in fact
has scarcely yet begun to be a world when the
volcanoes have done spouting, and the earthquakes are quaked out,
and you can tell what land is going to be
solid and keep its level twenty four hours, and the
swamps are filled up, and the deltas of the great

(02:30):
rivers like the Mississippi and the Nile become terra firma,
and men stop killing their fellows in order to get
their land and other property, then perhaps there will be
a world that an angel wouldn't weep over. Now one
half the world are employed in getting ready to kill
the other half, some of them by marching about in uniform,
and the others by hard work to earn money to

(02:52):
pay taxes to buy uniforms and guns. John was not
naturally very cruel, and it was probably the love of
display quite as much as of fighting that led him
into a military life, for he, in common with all
his comrades, had other traits of the savage. One of
them was the same passion for ornament that induces the
African to wear anklets and bracelets of hide and of metal,

(03:13):
and to decorate himself with tufts of hair and to
tattoo his body In John's day, there was a rage
at school among the boys for wearing bracelets woven of
the hair of the little girls. Some of them were
wonderful specimens of braiding. In twist, these were not captured
in war, but were sentimental tokens of friendship given by
the young maidens themselves. John's own hair was kept so

(03:35):
short as became a warrior, that you couldn't have made
a bracelet out of it, or anything except a paint brush.
But the little girls were not under military law, and
they willingly sacrificed their tresses to decorate the soldiers. They
esteemed as the Indian is honored in proportion to the
scalps he can display. At John's school, the boy was

(03:56):
held in highest respect who could show the most hair
trophies on his wrist. John himself had a variety that
would have pleased a mohawk, fine and coarse. And of
all colors there were the flaxen, the faded straw, the
glossy black, the lustrous brown, the dirty yellow, the undecided auburn,
and the fiery red. Perhaps his pulse beat more quickly

(04:18):
under the red hair of Cynthia Red than on account
of all the other wristlets put together, it was a
sort of gold tried in the fire color to John,
and burned there with a steady flame. Now that Cynthia
had become a Christian, this band of hair seemed a
more sacred, if less glowing possession. For all detached hair
will fade in time. And if he had known anything

(04:41):
about saints, he would have imagined that it was a
part of the ariolee that always goes with a saint.
But I am bound to say that while John had
a tender feeling for this red string, his sentiment was
not that of the man who becomes entangled in the
meshes of a woman's hair, and he valued rather the
number than the quality of these elecstic wristlets. John burned

(05:02):
with as real a military ardor as ever inflamed the
breast of any slaughterer of his fellows. He liked to
read of war, of encounters with the Indians, of any
kind of wholesale killing in glittering uniform, to the noise
of the terribly exciting fife and drum, which maddened the
combatants and drowned the cries of the wounded. In his future,

(05:23):
he saw himself a soldier with plume and sword, and
snug fitting decorated clothes very different from his somewhat roomy
trousers and country cut roundabout made by Aunt Elis, the
village tailoress, who cut out clothes not according to the
shape of the boy, but to what he was expected
to grow too, going where glory awaited him. In his

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observation of pictures, it was the common soldier who was
always falling and dying, while the officer stood unharmed in
the storm of bullets and waved his sword in a
heroic attitude. John determined to be an officer. It is
needless to say that he was an ardent member of
the military company of his village. He had risen from
the grade of corporal to that of first lieutenant. The

(06:05):
captain was a boy whose father was captain of the
grown militia company, and consequently had inherited military aptness and knowledge.
The old Captain was a flaming son of Mars, whose
nose militia wore general training and New England drum had
painted with the color of glory and disaster. He was
one of the gallant old soldiers of the peaceful days

(06:26):
of our country, splendid in uniform, a martinet in drill,
terrible in oaths, a glorious object when he marched at
the head of his company of flintlock muskets, with the
American banner full high advanced, and the clamorous drum, defying
the world. In this he fulfilled his duties of citizen,
faithfully teaching his uniformed companions how to march by the

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left leg and to get reeling drunk by sundown. Otherwise
he didn't amount to much in the community. His house
was unpainted, his fences were tumbled down, his farm was
a waste. His wife wore an old guares meeting to
which the captain never went. But he was a good
trout fisher, and there was no man in town who
spent more time at the country store and made more

(07:08):
shrewd observations upon the affairs of his neighbors. Although he
had never been in an asylum any more than he
had been in war, he was almost as perfect a
drunkard as he was soldier. He hated the British, whom
he had never seen, as much as he loved rum,
from which he was never separated. The company which his
son commanded, wearing his father's belt and sword. Was about

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as effective as the old company, and more orderly. It
contained from thirty to fifty boys according to the pressure
of chores at home, and it had its great days
of parade and its autumn maneuvers. Like the general training.
It was an artillery company, which gave every boy a
chance to wear a sword, and it possessed a small
mounted cannon which was dragged about and limbered and unlimbered

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and fired to the imminent danger of everybody, especially of
the company in point of marching, with all the legs
going together and twisting itself up and untwisting, breaking into
single file for Indian fighting, and forming platoons, turning a
sharp corner, and getting out of the way of a
wagon circling the town pump, frightening horses, stopping short in

(08:14):
front of the tavern, with ranks dressed and eyes right
and left. It was the equal of any military organization
I ever saw. It could train better than the big company,
and I think it did more good in keeping alive
the spirit of patriotism and desire to fight. Its discipline
was strict. If a boy left the ranks to jab
a spectator or make faces at a window, or go

(08:35):
for a striped snake. He was hollered at no end.
It was altogether a very serious business. There was no
levity about the hot and hard marching, and as boys
have no humor, nothing ludicrous occurred. John was very proud
of his office, and of his ability to keep the
rear ranks closed up and ready to execute any maneuver

(08:56):
when the captain hollered, which he did continually. He carried
a real sword, which his grandfather had worn in many
a militia campaign on the village Green. The rust upon
which John fancied was Indian blood. He had various red
and yellow insignia of military rank sewed upon different parts
of its clothes, And though his cocked hat was of pasteboard,

(09:17):
it was decorated with gilding and bright rosettes, and floated
a red feather that made his heart beat with martial
fury whenever he looked at it. The effect of this
uniform upon the girls was not a matter of conjecture.
I think they really cared nothing about it, but they
pretended to think it fine, and they fed the poor
boy's vanity. The weakness by which women govern the world.

(09:39):
The exalted happiness of John in this military service, I
dare say, was never equaled in any subsequent occupation. The
display of the company in the village filled him with
the loftiest heroism. There was nothing wanting but an enemy
to fight, but this could only be had by half
the company staining themselves with elderberry juice and going into
the woods as Indians, to fight the the artillery from

(10:00):
behind trees with bows and arrows, or to ambush it
and tomahawk the gunners. This, however, was made to seem
very like real war. Traditions of Indian cruelty were still
fresh in western Massachusetts. Behind John's house in the orchard
were some old slate tombstones, sunken and leaning, which recorded
the names of Captain Moses Rice and Phineas Arms, who

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had been killed by Indians in the last century while
at work in the meadow by the river, and who
slept there in the hope of the glorious resurrection. Phineas Arms, marshal,
name was long since dust, and even the mortal part
of the great Captain Moses Rice had been absorbed in
the soil and passed, perhaps with the sap up into
the old but still blooming apple trees. It was a

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quiet place where they lay, but they might have heard
if here they could the loud, continuous roar of the
deerfield and the stirring of the long grass on that
sunny slope. There was a tradition that years ago an Indian,
probably the last of his race, had been seen moving
along the crest of the mountain and gazing down into
the lovely valley which had been the favorite home of

(11:05):
his tribe, upon the fields where he drew his corn,
and the sparkling stream whence he drew his fish. John
used to fancy at times as he sat there, that
he could see that red specter gliding among the trees
on the hill. And if the tombstone suggested to him
the trump of judgment, he could not separate it from
the war whoop that had been the last sound. In
the era of Phineas arms. The Indian always preceded murder

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by the war whoop, and this was an advantage that
the artillery had in the fight with the Elderberry Indians.
It was warned in time, if there was no war whoop,
the killing didn't count. The artillery man got up and
killed the Indian. The Indian usually had the worst of it.
He not only got killed by the regulars, but he
got whipped by the home guard at night for staining

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himself and his clothes with the elderberry. But once a
year the company had a superlative parade. This was when
the military company from the north part of the town
joined the villagers in a general muster. This was an
infantry company, and not to be compared with that of
the village in point of evolutions. There was a great
and natural hatred between the North town boys in the center.

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I don't know why, but no contiguous African tribes could
be more hostile. It was all right for one of
either section to lick the other if he could, or
for half a dozen to lick one of the enemy
if they caught him alone. The notion of honor, as
of mercy comes into the boy only when he is
pretty well grown. To some neither ever comes. And yet

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there was an artificial military courtesy something like that existing
in the feudal age, no doubt, which put the meeting
of these two rival and mutually detested companies on a
high plane of behavior. It was beautiful to see the
seriousness of this lofty and studied condescension on both sides.
For the time everything was under martial law. The village

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company being the senior, its captain commanded the United Battalion
in the march. And this but John temporarily into the
position of captain, with the right to march at the
head and holler, a responsibility which realized all his hopes
of glory. I suppose there has yet been discovered by
man no gratification like that of marching at the head
of a column in uniform on parade, unless perhaps it

(13:16):
is marching at their head when they are leaving a
field of battle. John experienced all the thrill of this
conspicuous authority, and I dare say that nothing in his
later life has so exalted him in his own esteem.
Certainly nothing has since happened that was so important as
the events of that parade day seemed. He satiated himself

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with all the delights of war. End of Chapter seventeen,
recording by Mark Penfold.