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A Boy Soldier
By Scot Butler
1897

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Joseph R. T. Gordon

NOTE:  The portrait of Joseph R. T. Gordon hung in the Butler College chapel with the Stars and Stripes as background. Gordon was a young, spirited youth of the class of ’63 who enlisted in September 1861 as a private in Co. G, 9th Regiment, Indiana Volunteer Infantry. On 13 December 1861, Pvt. Gordon was killed at Buffalo Mountain, West Virginia.

The following tribute by Scot Butler (1844-1931) originally appeared in The Butler Collegian in 1897.  It was reprinted in the Butler Alumnal Quarterly in July 1917 and May 1921.  Butler served as a private, in Co. A, 33rd Regiment, Indiana Volunteer Infantry.  He later was a professor of Latin at Butler University and served as its president.

When the guns of Sumter sounded war’s first summons, the writer had not yet reached the military age.  Such circumstance, to the eager spirit, might not have proved an insuperable barrier.  To many it did not.  Boys of sixteen, sturdy for their years, perhaps, at any rate of fine courage and adventurous temper, shouldered the musket and the knapsack and marched away, with young hearts swelling, to camp, to bivouac, to battlefield, to deadly picket station, to prison pen, perhaps, and, perhaps, to a lonely grave under whispering pine trees on southern hills. And where they went they bore themselves as bravely as did they that were men in years.  And more bravely! The knapsack is a cruel thing for tender shoulders, and on the march, a Springfield rifle with its accompaniment of cartridge box and bayonet, and waist belt and shoulder belt, and further the haversack and the uneasy canteen, is a man’s load.

In war, as in life, the stress that tries the soul comes not on great battlefields.  There example invites emulation; while the world looks on the soldier is incited to noble deeds; in rush of battle, while artillery thunders and shells shriek through the startled air, and solid columns advance bearing their colors gallantly, mean is he that is not a hero.  Then is not the test. It is toil and privation and hunger of body and of soul, and disappointment and defeat and injustice and cold and loneliness that chill and crush and grind.

And yet, as for me, I have always loved camp life.  After many years I have a sort of home feeling for it yet.  In memory the campfire burns very cheerily for me.  It takes me back to nights of long ago, when, pillowed on my saddle, I watched the ruddy flames mount up.  The scent of burning cedar takes me back to a past scarcely half remembered, more than half forgot, yet fondly cherished still as men cherish dim memory of childhood home; so that pungent odor, whenever, wherever it strikes upon my sense, carries me back to long-forgotten camps in Tennessee and Georgia.  And often do I ride again down into broad valley, alight with cheerful fires, where, the night before the battle twenty thousand men were bivouacked. I hear again the shout, the song, the badinage; above the roll of drums, the fife threads its high, clear way, and bugles call.  That was many, many years ago. The past dies?  Ah, but its spirit lives and bears one silent company evermore.

As regards boy soldiers about whom I began to write: The heroism of some that I have known is proof only of this, which needs no proof, namely, that manly spirit is not a thing of years; one may be a hero at fifteen or may live till fifty to be a puling infant still.  I shall recall now but one.  In the Pythonian Hall (now on the chapel wall) there hangs the portrait of a boy.  He was a member of the Pythonian Society and was killed in battle the first year of the war.  Perhaps that portrait is an imperfect thing and suggests little to those who never knew the soul it crudely pictures; meaningless it is, no doubt, to those who daily come and go, for Joe Gordon was dead before they had yet been born; and what is a name after the man is dead that wore it?  What is the human form, much less any image or picture of it that man’s cunning can devise, after the animating spirit has departed?  Of the dead one there lingers for a little while in the hearts of those that had known and loved him, a memory; by and by these survivors, too, die, and then memory’s self is dead.  A name means nothing, nothing as to personality, though it be perpetuated in literature, though it be carved in granite, though it be associated with whatever is grandest and most enduring of human achievements.  Nothing. But this name, written here for careless eye, and to such meaningless and unsuggestive, is to me a living memory that starts the fount of tears.

He went out with the first troops that enlisted from our State.  It was in the spring of ’61.  The men enrolled under the first call were enlisted for the period of three months and sent to Virginia.  In whatever part of the State they had been recruited they were brought to Indianapolis and fitted out preparatory to being sent on to the front.  They came into town from day to day in unordered squads, were taken out to camp, formed into companies and regiments, uniformed, furnished with arms and equipments, and, after proper drill and preparation, the well-ordered columns, to sound of fife and drums, with knapsacks on their backs and arms at right-shoulder- shift, marched down through the streets to take the train.  And with one of these regiments marched Joe.

The pageantry of war is fine.  In the brightness of the morning there comes the glory of the guard-mount; eager is the soldier’s spirit then, alive, brave, hopeful; and when the day declines and evening sun gilds hill and valley and paints with brighter hues the regimental colors, there’s a hush, a deep impressiveness, in the solemn stateliness of dress parade. Thus begin and thus end the active duties of the day in camp; and when the darkness of the night has come, out on the still air there floats a mellow bugle call – there’s pathos in the note – to summon soldier- men to rest.

There is fun in camp.  First of all the soldier has no care.  To others belong responsibility for the future.  He lives from hour to hour.  His wants are, in some sort, provided for.  No further act of his is called for.  And so song and jest and jollity go on.  There are hard lines in camp life; discomfort, weariness, and waiting, a dreadful monotony sometimes that grows maddening.

And do it is with soldiering.  Is life at its best much better?  Joe learned all this.  For some short time he lived it.  It was in the mountains of Virginia.  He made acquaintance with cold and hunger.  After days of toil he found sleep sweet on the bare ground.  Thirst parched his lips and his eye grew bloodshot with vigils on lonely picket station.  Grimed was he with soil of earth, and coarsest fare furnished him.  But he lived the free and careless life of camps and his heart swelled with pride to make part of war’s pageantry.  When song and jest went round, his voice piped in boyish treble among the notes that swelled from coarser throats.

Thus it is ever.  We live regardless of the future, heedless of what the morrow has in store for us. Meanwhile the inevitable hour comes to meet us.  One day when with his comrades he rushed in deadly charge across a lead-swept field, panting, not more from physical exhaustion than from exaltation of spirit, joyous with the fierce joy of battle, confident, victorious, with fair brow upraised – in that supreme moment there came one lightning flash of agony and death claimed him.

So he died – died at seventeen – and the fair promise of his years was snuffed out with a musket shot.  He died a boy, but he died with men, and his soul, too, goes marching on.