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The Dogs of War 1861 1st Edition Emory M. Thomas
Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Emory M. Thomas
ISBN(s): 9780195174700, 0195174704
Edition: 1st
File Details: PDF, 1.96 MB
Year: 2011
Language: english
The Dogs of War
 1861 
The Dogs
of War
 1861 
EMORY M. THOMAS

1
 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further
Oxford University’s objective of excellence
in research, scholarship, and education.

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Copyright © 2011 by Emory M. Thomas

Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.

198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016
www.oup.com
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Thomas, Emory M., 1939–
The dogs of war : 1861 / Emory M. Thomas.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-517470-0
1. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Causes.
2. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Public opinion.
3. Public opinion—United States—History—19th century.
4. Public opinion—Confederate States of America.
5. Sectionalism (United States)—History—19th century.
6. Lincoln, Abraham, 1809–1865—Political and social views.
7. Davis, Jefferson, 1808–1869—Political and social views. I. Title.
E471.T56 2011 973.7′11—dc22 2010042959

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
  For some Thomases 
Frances Taliaferro

Emory Morton, Jr.

John Taliaferro

Samuel Taliaferro

Emily Anne
Marshall Emory

Laura Leonardy

Julia Marlene

Janice Marie
  Contents 
Preface . . . ix

1
The Martial Moment, 1861 . . . 1

2
War Dogs: 1861 and After . . . 21

3
Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of War . . . 37

4
Jefferson Davis and the Coming of War . . . 57

5
Chum: First Blood at First Bull Run . . . 69

Conclusion: Resonance . . . 89

Notes . . . 93

Index . . . 103
  Preface 
THIS IS A “THINK B O O K ”— THE product of reflecting upon the
compelling drama surrounding the onset of the American Civil
War. This is also a short book, a nonfiction novella, Clio laconic. I
focus upon the critical events from the election of Abraham Lin-
coln to the opening battle at Bull Run/Manassas. Here is “revi-
sionist history” in the sense that I ask new questions of essentially
well-known facts.
It should come as no surprise that new questions provoke new
answers. But my principal conclusion is yet another question:
What were they thinking?
I know and insist here that issues about slavery and race
inspired secessions among Southern states. Anyone who still
doubts this truth should read Charles B. Dew’s Apostles of
Disunion.
I contend here that the Civil War happened because nearly
no one had a clue about what they were doing. Public and pri-
vate discourse was loud and long and wrong about what might
happen if war broke out. Americans on both sides of the
Potomac and Ohio rivers seemed convinced that no war would
occur, or that if secession indeed led to conflict, one battle or
campaign would ensure victory for “our” side. Some people,
mostly in the South, seemed to embrace war as an apocalyptic
answer to the sectional quandary. Some people, principally in
the North, believed that war would be “good for us.” But most
people seemed to believe that war would never happen, or if it
 x ♦ p r e fac e

did, that the worthless cowards on the other side would not
fight.
Americans with military training and experience for the most
part understood what a long and costly war might ensue. But
people who made the decisions in the “martial moment” either
did not consult those who knew or did not heed their counsel. As
a result, Americans were especially vulnerable to “unintended
consequences,” so much so that I nominate this species of mishap
for inclusion in the military lexicon as a corollary to Murphy’s law.
Abraham Lincoln was born in the border South and married
into a Southern family. Nevertheless, Lincoln was a long time
learning that the majority of white Southerners were willing and
able to risk their lives for the Confederacy. I suggest that Lincoln’s
failure to understand Southerners influenced public policy during
the war and even the policy of Reconstruction.
Jefferson Davis was rare among political leaders in his grasp
of what was happening. Davis likely knew that he was following a
course that would lead to war, and that war would be long and
bloody. But he did what he did because he seemed to believe that
duty and honor required him to do so. And he believed that in the
long term he would win.
The first full-scale battle, First Manassas or First Bull Run,
developed from many efforts at grand strategy. Combat was fierce
and chaotic. The order that most influenced the outcome was “Go
to the sound of the firing.” And the side that won that battle lost
the war.
All of this resonates in the twenty-first century.
Of course other learned people have thought and written
about this period and these events. I am especially grateful for the
 p r e fac e ♦ xi

work and works of Steve Berry, Bill Cooper, Jack Davis, Harold
Holzer, Maury Klein, Charles Dew, Kerry Trask, Steve Wood-
worth (with the late Warren Wilkinson), Jim McPherson, Rai-
mondo Luraghi, David Detzer, Nelson Lankford, William W.
Freehling, Chris Phillips, and John M. McCardell Jr.
As ever, I thank Frances Taliaferro Thomas, still the first wife,
for her friendship and support. She even broke her promise to
herself and typed some of this manuscript.
At Oxford University Press, my new best friends rendered
potential tedium fun. Tim Bent offered indulgence, counsel, and
encouragement. Tim’s assistant, Mally Anderson, was very helpful.
And Joellyn Ausanka reversed roles, becoming a reader who took
pains to save the writer pain.
The Dogs of War
 1861 
  Chapter One 
Th e
Martial Moment,


1861
What king going out to wage war against another king will not sit
down and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to oppose
the one who comes against him with twenty thousand? If he
cannot, then, while the other is still far away, he sends a delegation
and asks for the terms of peace.
—LUKE 14:31–32

when it did as it did at Fort

T H E A M E R I C A N C I V I L W A R B EG A N

Sumter in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, because

James Chesnut ordered it so.
On April 12, 1861, Chesnut was senior aide to Confederate
general Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard and empowered to
decide between peace and war. Chesnut, now best known as the
husband of Confederate diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut, was then
forty-six years old and until recently had been a United States sen-
ator from South Carolina. He had himself rowed out to Fort Sum-
ter during the afternoon of April 11 to deliver to Major Robert
 2 ♦ The Dogs of War

Anderson, who commanded the small garrison of Federal troops

on the island fort, the demand from Beauregard to surrender.
Beauregard promised to transport Anderson and his men “to any
post in the United States which you may select” and to permit
Anderson to salute his flag “on taking it down.”
Anderson termed Beauregard’s terms “fair, manly, and cour-
teous” but declined to comply. Honor and orders compelled him to
remain at his post. Then, as Chesnut prepared to carry this written
refusal back to Beauregard, Anderson offered a verbal observation
that he would have been “starved out” within a few days and thus
compelled to evacuate Fort Sumter. Chesnut pondered these words
and passed them on to Beauregard, who in turn relayed Anderson’s
observation to the Confederate government in Montgomery.
Maybe peace was possible, or at least war did not have to com-
mence there and then. Messages moved by telegraph to Mont-
gomery, then back to Charleston, and at 1:00 am on April 12,
Chesnut and his entourage rowed again to Fort Sumter.
When, Chesnut inquired, would Anderson consider himself
“starved out”? Anderson answered that he would have to give that
question serious thought and convened with his staff in a gun case-
mate to frame a response. The Federal officers deliberated for two
hours, then returned to Chesnut, to whom Anderson handed over
his written reply—he would evacuate Fort Sumter at noon on
April 15, if nothing hostile happened before that time.1

♦♦♦

Chesnut was not the cleverest of people, but he realized immedi-

ately that Anderson was simply delaying the inevitable. Anderson
knew that his resupply was en route, indeed overdue already. So
 T h e M a rt i a l M o m e n t, 1 8 6 1 ♦ 3

within five minutes Chesnut had dictated his fateful message. At

3:20 am he had the honor to inform Anderson that Beauregard
would “open the fire of his batteries on Fort Sumter in one hour
from this time.”
As it happened, the Confederates were ten minutes late. At
4:30 am a ten-inch mortar at Fort Johnson on James Island lofted
a signal shell toward the island fort. The missile exploded
roughly 100 feet above the fort—a “capital shot.” War had begun.
It all seemed so rational. The United States and the Confed-
erate States had policies. The Confederacy could not permit what
it had designated as a foreign fort to control access to one of its
principal ports; the United States could not surrender federal
property to a government that it did not recognize as legally exist-
ing. Both wanted some end to the limbo that the secession crisis
had generated. So presidents and cabinet secretaries and generals
issued orders, and subordinates had to obey them. Anderson and
Chesnut were pawns in a monstrous game of chess. When Ches-
nut chose war, he really believed that he had no option, and very
few people in North America at the time would have disagreed
with him.
The war that Chesnut began had been coming for a long time.
Enmity between North and South was profound as well as pro-
longed. At issue were radically different visions of good and evil,
right and wrong.
I have said in print about the Southern “cause”:

The Southern cause was the transcendent extension of

the Southern life style: the cause was ideology. In this
context “ideology” is not synonymous with “dogma” or
 4 ♦ The Dogs of War

“doctrine.” Rather, Southern ideology was a belief

system, a value system, a world view, or Weltanschauung. It
was the result of a secular transubstantiation in which
the common elements in Southern life became sanctified
in the Southern mind. The South’s ideological cause was
more than the sum of its parts, more than the material
circumstances and conditions from which it sprang. In
the Confederate South the cause was ultimately an affair
of the viscera.2

Certainly slavery and race provoked Southern secession.

Those white Southerners who “sold” disunion and the Southern
voters and members of what became secession conventions
believed that union with the United States and the “black
Republican” administration of Abraham Lincoln would soon
doom slavery and as a consequence the “way of life” based upon
racial subordination.3
About the Northern commitment I have written:

The Union was an important abstraction in the American

mind. It was the vehicle in which reformers could do
good, the only means of eradicating slavery. It was the
best hope of liberal democracy in the world. It was the
setting for economic enterprise. It was the sine qua non of
the American world-view. If the Union fails, then George
III will have the last laugh. No one said these things, at
least not in these words. They did not have to. Americans
in 1861 acted out their success to a perception of reality
which seemed to them self-evident.4
 T h e M a rt i a l M o m e n t, 1 8 6 1 ♦ 5

These conflicting visions of the world lay at the base of the conflict
that produced the war.
But the world has always been full of peoples who profess
ideological conflict with other peoples. Sometimes they go to
war with each other; most times they choose to live in peace,
albeit often an uneasy one. The important question about
Northern and Southern Americans in 1861, therefore, is why
they elected to fight. What drove them past posing, posturing,
and politics into armed conflict?
Historian David M. Potter once spoke to this question with
uncommon insight:

Historians try to be rational beings and tend to write

about history as if it were a rational process. Accord-
ingly, they number the alternatives, and talk about
choices and decisions, and equate decisions with what
the decisions led to. But if we examine the record of
modern wars, it would seem that the way people get
into a war is seldom by choosing it; usually it is by
choosing a course that leads to it—which is a different
thing altogether.5

About the Republicans in Washington in 1861, Potter suggested:

When they took the steps that led them into a war,
they did so not because they had decisively chosen the
road to Appomattox or even the road to Manassas, in
preference to the other paths; instead they did so
precisely because they could not grasp the fearfully
 6 ♦ The Dogs of War

decisive consequences of the rather indecisive line of

action which they followed in the months preceding their
fateful rendezvous.6

He might have stated much the same thing about the Con-
federates in Montgomery. Both sides, it seems, decided to go to
war because they could not—or would not—calculate the cost
of their decisions.
Given this, it is well worth asking why and how Americans
plunged themselves into so catastrophic a conflict. Why did it
seem so rational and right during those crucial days in April
and May 1861 for governments to commit themselves to war,
and for peoples on both sides to volunteer to do the fighting for
them?
More than rationality was at work. Several sorts of fantasy
seemed to preoccupy the potential belligerents and incline them
toward war. Among the speeches, sermons, editorials, and other
forms of discourse, public and private, was an enormous amount
of nonsense pretending to truth. The war occurred because leaders
and people on both sides made assumptions—tragically erroneous
ones—that the conflict would be short, simple, and decisive. This
was the major chord one hears when listening to the discourse that
inclined toward war.
There are at least two minor chords as well. Some people,
principally in the South, seemed to subscribe to an apocalyptic
vision: better to resolve the issues with a bang rather than with
a whimper. Others, principally in the North, seemed to believe
that war would produce a cathartic effect, would be “good
for us.”
 T h e M a rt i a l M o m e n t, 1 8 6 1 ♦ 7

At one level, the American Civil War is a huge morality tale.

It is a “good war,” fought to abolish slavery, affirm industrial capi-
talism, and establish national sovereignty in “we the people” (as
opposed to “we the states”). At another level, however, the Ameri-
can Civil War offers a set of lessons about assumptions, actions,
and consequences—erroneous assumptions, rash actions, and
unintended consequences.
A “martial moment” is that increment of time when nations,
peoples, groups, or individuals decide to stop negotiating, pos-
turing, or posing and commit to physical force. The resort to
violence may occur in a literal moment; it may take longer. If war
is the extension of politics by other means (armed force), then the
decision to fight may be as simple as calling the bluff of
a schoolyard bully or as complicated as attempting to locate
national interest within a set of tangling alliances. However they
happen, martial moments are worthy of analysis and under-
standing.
The first paper I wrote in graduate school, half a century
ago, concerned the “repressible conflict” school of Civil War revi-
sionism. In the 1950s and 1960s historians and others argued
that the war was the result of fanatics—white “fire-eaters” in the
South and abolitionists in the North. Committed ideologues
stirred otherwise peaceable Americans into frenzy. Instead of
slavery, the war was about propaganda. I do not intend to rein-
vigorate this interpretation, which collapsed under the weight of
all manner of sectional, logical, and ideological baggage.7
What I do propose is a fresh look at an old story. When
we reflect upon the confrontation at Fort Sumter, it becomes
impossible not to conclude that the belligerents were absurdly
 8 ♦ The Dogs of War

ignorant of the cost of combat. We know why Southerners se-

ceded from the United States—slavery and race. But secession
did not necessarily provoke war. To understand why the Ameri-
can Civil War happened, we’re forced to resort to descriptors
such as “rash,” “imprudent,” “heedless,” and “foolish.” Within the
rhetoric of the martial moment was an astonishing amount of
downright stupidity.
Let’s begin with Gone with the Wind. An early scene in the
novel and the film based upon Margaret Mitchell’s work features
“war talk” among hot-blooded Southern males, and one of a
series of belligerent boasts is the assertion that a single South-
erner can lick twenty Yankees. Scarlett O’Hara pronounces such
rhetoric “silly,” and hindsight both in the novel and in reality
affirms this judgment. But James Chesnut made precisely the
same assertion, assuring his wife that Confederate troops could
trounce twice their number of Unionists. A Confederate soldier,
having just seen 3,000 of his comrades muster, wrote, “It
appeared to me that we could whip the whole . . . forces of the
North.” At the time Union volunteers numbered 310,000, a
100-to-1 ratio.8
In Ellen Glasgow’s novel The Battle-Ground (1902), Champe, a
young college student, rushes home to volunteer for the fight. Dis-
cussion ensues about how much underwear Champe should take
with him. His uncle, a veteran of the War of 1812 and the Mexi-
can War, brushes aside concerns that Champe might “run short of
things.” “It’s going to be a two weeks’ war, and you shall take an
outfit for two weeks, or stay at home! By God, sir, if you contradict
me again I’ll not let you go to fight the Yankees.” In the face of this
authoritative confidence, Champe relents: “It’s to be a war of two
 T h e M a rt i a l M o m e n t, 1 8 6 1 ♦ 9

weeks, and I’ll come home a Major-general.” A sample of con-

temporary pundits reveals that most thought the war would be
only slightly longer.9
Among Northern newspapers the New York Tribune predicted
the conquest of Richmond within “a fortnight” and of Raleigh by
August 1, three and a half months after Sumter. Editor Horace
Greeley insisted, “Jeff Davis & Co. will be swinging from the bat-
tlements at Washington at least by the 4th of July.” The New
Haven Daily Palladium predicted victory in six months, the Chicago
Tribune said two or three months, and the New York Times projected
thirty days.10
Confederate Southerners were similarly sanguine. A woman
in Richmond heard a speaker predict that in less than sixty days
the Confederate flag would fly over the White House in Wash-
ington. The Confederate secretary of war, Leroy Pope Walker,
asserted that his flag would fly over the dome of the Capitol in
Washington “before the first of May.” South Carolinian politician
James Henry Hammond wrote William Gilmore Simms in July
1861 that Confederates would capture the White House “before
Christmas.”11
Perhaps anticipating Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage, in
which a bloodstained bandage becomes an emblem of honor,
would-be combatants debated how much blood the war, if it came,
might require. In Charleston an Episcopal priest encountered
James Chesnut and exclaimed, “These are troublous times,
Colonel; we are at the beginning of a terrible war.” “Not at all,”
protested Chesnut, “there will be no war, it will be all arranged. I
will drink all the blood shed in the war.” Secretary Walker was
equally convinced of the bloodless prospect of founding the new
 10 ♦ The Dogs of War

nation. He insisted that one handkerchief would soak up all the

blood spilled in any war that might come.12
One reason Chesnut and Walker were so dramatically wrong
about the amount of blood spilled was the nature of the princi-
pal weapon combatants employed. In previous wars Americans
had fought with muskets, which fired a round ball of lead from
a smooth bore. Muskets were accurate and lethal only at less
than 100 yards. During the Civil War soldiers fought with rifles,
which fired a conically shaped piece of lead from a rifled bore.
Spiraled grooves inside the barrel extended range and accuracy
to 300–500 yards. Artillery, too, during the Civil War fired explo-
sive shells from rifled tubes, rendering gunners more accurate
at greater range. However, infantry rifles, like artillery pieces,
were single-shot weapons requiring twenty to thirty seconds to
reload. Consequently, soldiers still had to go into battle in dense
formations, so that one soldier might fire at the enemy while his
comrades were reloading. Dense formations did generate con-
siderable firepower. Yet they generated splendid targets as well.
Efficient weapons and massed enemies created enormous casu-
alties in this impending conflict.13
Few if any realized the impact of rifles during the first half of
1861. Even so, the weapons that various combatants planned to
use seemed absurd. A visitor in Richmond reported that resi-
dents were stockpiling rocks in upper-story rooms along Main
Street, proposing to hurl these rocks at any Federal troops who
reached downtown Richmond. Governor Joseph Brown of
Georgia purchased 7,099 pikes, six-foot-long poles with knives
attached, with which to arm troops from his state. A pike, Brown
insisted, “never fails to fire, and never wastes a single load.” The
 T h e M a rt i a l M o m e n t, 1 8 6 1 ♦ 11

editor of one of the Confederacy’s most influential newspapers

wrote in 1861, “No people on the face of the earth are so much
to be feared in hand-to-hand conflict . . . [with] bayonet, small
sword, or bowie knife as the defenders of the flag of the Confed-
eracy.” Within a year of writing this boast, the editor, Obadiah
Jennings Wise, had marched to war and been killed—perhaps
attacking Union artillery with his small sword.14
The editor’s father, Henry A. Wise, former governor and
future Confederate general, reportedly declared, “Let brave men
advance with flint locks and old-fashioned bayonets, on the
popinjays of the Northern cities.” He would, Wise said, “answer
for it with his life, that the Yankees would break and run.”15
Another weapon that Southerners believed might be imme-
diately decisive in this war was weather. In late April 1861, the
publisher of the New Bern Republican wrote North Carolina gover-
nor John W. Ellis from Washington, “The hot season is approach-
ing, and a summer[’]s sun in the South is not agreeable to
Northern Constitutions. At the end of three months, the furor in
the Northern States will have subsided, and these men cannot be
persuaded to enlist again.” In Georgia, delegate Henry L. Ben-
ning asserted at what became the secession convention, “Our
very climate is a terror to men of northern climate. . . . Who
would volunteer for the glory of dying of black vomit?” Even
Confederate president Jefferson Davis, who certainly should have
known better, wrote his friend Leonidas Polk, then Episcopal
bishop of Louisiana and later a Confederate general, “The
people of the northwestern States have so great a dread of our
climate that they could not be prevailed on to march against
us.”16
 12 ♦ The Dogs of War

T. S. Eliot concludes “The Hollow Men” with the lines “This

is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.” Some
involved in the origins of this war seemed resigned to the end of
their world but were at least determined to reverse Eliot’s order.
They elected to go down in flames in some apocalyptic cata-
clysm rather than to wither into passivity.
At the very least they employed apocalyptic rhetoric to under-
score what they felt was at stake in this conflict. William L. Harris
of Mississippi pleaded before the secession convention of Georgia
that Mississippi “had rather see the last of her race, men, women,
and children, immolated in one common funeral pile, than see
them subjected to the degradation of civil, political and social
equality with the negro race.” Louisiana senator Judah Benjamin,
future Confederate cabinet member, told the United States Senate
on New Year’s Eve 1860 that the North might “carry desolation
into our peaceful land, and with torch and fire you may set our
cities in flames . . . but you never can subjugate us; you never can
convert the free sons of the soil into vassals, paying tribute to your
power; and you never, never can degrade them to the level of an
inferior and servile race.” Such statements by people in positions of
leadership give ample evidence of the determination to destroy the
Old South rather than compromise. As Raimondo Luraghi, the
great Italian historian of the Civil War, has written, most members
of the leadership class in the South knew their society was doomed.
They could only choose “the best way to die.”17
Somewhat akin to the apocalyptic commitment in the Con-
federacy was the belief in some quarters of the United States
that war, should it come, would be “good for us.” Representative
of this cathartic conviction is an editorial from the Springfield,
 T h e M a rt i a l M o m e n t, 1 8 6 1 ♦ 13

Massachusetts, Daily Republican on April 20, 1861, written a

week after the firing on Fort Sumter:

The greatest curse that can befal[l] a country is a peace

that fosters corruption. It is pure water that rolls over
Niagara; it is bad water that sleeps in the Dead Sea. . . . It
is in motion—collision—combat—that power finds
development and piety purification. . . . The government
has become so corrupt as to fall to pieces of its own rotten
weight. . . . Thank God! this is all changed. The Christian
church that had grown sleepy, and had gaped in its
prayers, has found something to pray for, and is praying
for it . . . America has a recognized God to-day; and it is
very doubtful whether she would have had one if war had
not hurried the nation into His presence.

Then, after joyful news that “brokers and bankers, and specu-
lators and scriveners—lank-bellies and big-bellies—start from
their chairs in Wall street, put on their hats, and rush out into the
open air and shout,” the editor concludes the paean for war. “We
believe that when this struggle passes by, we shall be a better
and stronger nation for it. The medicine is harsh, but who will
dare to say that it is not needful? Let it come, then; and may God
in his mercy make it the blessing to us which he means it to be!”18

♦♦♦

What about the “enemies”? Here follows a sample of the rhetoric

on both sides about the other side. One editor of an influential
newspaper in Richmond pronounced, “The Yankee is afraid of
 14 ♦ The Dogs of War

guns and horses, because he has not been taught to shoot and ride
in boyhood.” The editor, John M. Daniel of the Richmond Exam-
iner, continued his analysis:

Cowardice is carefully inculcated on the Yankee from his

birth; and if he be not a coward, he must be a fool who
won’t take education. But he is no fool; for, whilst he is
taught that fighting is unprofitable, and therefore to be
avoided, he is instructed, at the same time, that cunning
and sharpness and cheating are very creditable and very
profitable; and no one learns these latter lessons more
readily and rapidly than he. He is born like other people,
but becomes a coward and a knave from severe training
and careful education. Every day we hear it said and see
it written that the people of the North are personally as
brave as the people of the South. It is wholly untrue.

Daniel served as a volunteer aide on the staff of a Confederate

general for a brief period. He remained active as the editor of his
newspaper until very near the end of the war. He died in March
1865, having had ample opportunity to realize the error of his
pseudo-sociological foolishness.19
Editors and pundits in the North were, if possible, even more
vituperative than their Southern counterparts. Readers learned
from the Paris, Maine, Oxford Democrat on May 31, 1861:

Travel creation over and you can find nothing in savage

or civilized life, that for attrocity [sic], moral debasement,
and unmitigated total depravity, will for a moment
 T h e M a rt i a l M o m e n t, 1 8 6 1 ♦ 15

compare with the hell-born confederacy at Montgomery.

Sodom, Gomorrah, and the “cities of the plain,” in
point of morals, would go into the kingdom of heaven
before it: and if the christian men of this nation . . . do
not wipe it out, there is not an attribute of the Almighty
that does not point directly to its complete and final
destruction.20

In Detroit readers of the Daily Advertiser learned about Texas:

Every horse thief, murderer, gambler, robber, and other

rogue of high and low degree, fled to Texas when he
found the United States too hot longer to hold him.
The pioneers of that State were cut-throats of one kind
or another, with some honorable exceptions. Those of
them who have escaped hanging or the State prison,
and their descendants, are the men who have led the
secession movement in that State.21

The Bellefontaine (Ohio) Republican on December 15, 1860,

informed readers about the Carolinas:

South Carolina was Tory during the revolution. She had

no “revolutionary fathers.” She is bastard—politically
speaking. Excepting Marion, and Sumpter [sic], with a
handfull of followers, there were no friends of
Washington in South Carolina, during the times that
tried men[’]s souls. . . . The men of the north conquered
the State of Carolina during the war of the revolution.
 16 ♦ The Dogs of War

We may do so again; and will do so, if there can be any

evidence produced, that her people are capable of self
government, and are worth the trouble of being licked
into decency.

North Carolina fared even worse in the editor’s analysis:

As for North Carolina, it is known that she is the most

ignorant and degraded of all the States. In North
Carolina in 1850, there were 73,566 white inhabi-
tants over twenty years of age, who could not read
and write. . . . And this is one of those States that
purpose to dispense with the schoolmaster altogether,
rather than hire one from the north! Their politicians
object to the north sending books and newspapers
amongst their citizens, to enlighten them. They will
soon have no cause of fear from that source, for ere
long, there will be no body down there, who can read
them.
They eat mud in North Carolina. . . .
The people are like oysters—without brains, but
bellies full of mud. It might be supposed that this habit
of dirt eating, had rendered them idiotic, if it were not
certain, that they must have been idiotic in the first
place, or they would never have begun the practice. . . .
They are all fully africanized [sic] in intelligence and
morals, and are fast becoming so in blood. The Carolinas
may go in welcome, so far as we are personally
concerned. But we have no doubt it would be good
 T h e M a rt i a l M o m e n t, 1 8 6 1 ♦ 17

policy, after the niggers are done with them, to drive

what may remain into the swamps of Florida, as food for
al[l]igators.22

The editor in Ohio was not the only pundit to introduce the
prospect of racial violence in the seceded South. The New York
World on April 30, 1861, raised the specter of slave rebellion and
Federal troops as saviors of white Southerners.

They cannot convert bales of cotton into food, nor

garments, nor munitions of war. . . . Their inability to
procure their accustomed supplies of food from the
Northwest will cause gaunt famine to stalk over the
plantations, and the pains of unappeased hunger will
raise wide-spread negro insurrections and their atten-
dant atrocities, without any aid from the abolitionists.
The mind recoils horror-struck from the terrible
picture which it requires no prophetic hand to paint.
The lurid smoke from a hundred thousand blazing
human habitations, set on fire in the night time . . .
helpless children butchered by an infuriated and hellish
black rabble; half-naked women flying in terror from
the lurid light of their own dwellings, panting to escape
into the friendly protecting darkness, and rescue
themselves from a fate worse than ten thousand deaths,
are scenes which would promptly reconcile the
surviving white population to any government that
could save them.23
 18 ♦ The Dogs of War

Of course, not all Northern and Southern newspapers were

so rabid as those here sampled. But this is indeed a sample, and
readers of this confident vitriol confirmed whatever negative
stereotypes they held. If the war came, many believed, the
“enemy” would hardly be a formidable foe.
What about the people in positions of leadership? What
about Abraham Lincoln and the men who served in his cabinet?
How about Jefferson Davis and his cabinet? These were people
who should have known better than to embrace illusions that
all Yankees were cowards or that all Rebels were oysters.
I believe, with some evidence, that Lincoln never could
grasp the depth and breadth of secessionist conviction among
the mass of white Southerners, nor quite fathom the deference
and allegiance plain folk in the South paid to the planter class.
He believed that common white folk in the South were very
much like the people with whom he had grown up in Indiana
and Illinois. As a result of these assumptions, Lincoln did not take
seriously support for secession in the South. During the
period between his election to the presidency and his inauguration
on March 4, 1861, Lincoln was circumspect about his intentions
regarding the seceded states. This was not yet his crisis, after all.
But he constantly referred to an “artificial crisis,” as though seces-
sion were going to go away and the Confederate States of America
collapse by the time he took office. Lincoln could never seem to
believe that white Southern folk would follow the planters out of
the Union or put their lives on the line for a planter-dominated
republic. He was wrong again.24
Nevertheless, throughout the war Lincoln seemed convinced
that if he could just communicate with Southern white folk, he
 T h e M a rt i a l M o m e n t, 1 8 6 1 ♦ 19

could make them aware that their interests did not lie with the
planter aristocracy. The Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation,
for example, applied only to rebels; if loyal Southerners asserted
themselves, they could avoid emancipation. Lincoln was eager to
proclaim amnesty and once in 1864 authorized a daring cavalry
raid in part to deliver his proclamations behind Confederate lines.
And at the heart of Lincoln’s plan for Reconstruction was the
belief that white Southerners now had to realize the failure of the
planter leadership and would embrace the Union if given half a
chance.
If indeed Lincoln did consistently underestimate the commit-
ment of common white Southerners to the Confederate cause,
this factor explains why he accepted war. He did not believe that
the South would be able to raise and sustain an army. He, like
many others, was convinced that Confederate armies would have
generals and perhaps colonels, but no soldiers.
Jefferson Davis believed that in the worst case, war, Confed-
erate Southerners would prevail. In the beginning Davis hoped
to establish a defensive shield along his borders with the United
States. Once invading armies from the North confronted deter-
mined Confederate troops and realized the challenge involved
in subduing the new republic, and saw firsthand that the South
was serious about establishing itself, the Union would abandon
any quest for conquest. Failing that, Davis fell back upon the
strategic heritage of the American Revolution and the experi-
ence of the Continental Army. He believed that he could become
the new George Washington. The “offensive defense” became
his plan. Confederate forces could permit their enemies to pen-
etrate Southern soil, and then—at a time and circumstance of
 20 ♦ The Dogs of War

their choosing—strike and defeat the Federals. If all else failed,

Confederate Southerners would take to the hills and fight on as
guerrillas as long as necessary to achieve independence. Like
Washington, Davis would husband his resources and keep the
faith. Every day the Confederacy survived was a step toward vic-
tory. The Confederacy could win by not losing.
Davis’s strategy, as it evolved, depended upon winning a war
of wills with the United States. Hindsight demonstrated Davis’s
failure to grasp the determination of the Lincoln administration
and the American people to fight to a successful conclusion. But in
the period when his government committed to conflict, he seemed
confident that his potential enemy would not display the will to
fight necessary to win.25
The dogs of war, once unleashed, go where they will, and war-
fare usually defies the efforts of either side to control it. Assump-
tions about quick and painless victories are often facile and rarely
accurate. The experience of the American Civil War still offers
lessons: War is very serious. Combat begets chaos.
  Chapter Two 
Wa r Dogs:
1861 and


After
Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war.
—SHAKESPEARE, JULIUS CAESAR

THE SPEAKER OF THE CALL to arms quoted above is Marc Antony,

alone onstage in act three, addressing the slain Caesar. Antony
predicts “domestic fury and fierce civil strife,” and we know that
the play concludes on the plains of Philippi with extremely “fierce
civil strife,” in the aftermath of which Brutus (“Et tu, Brute?”) loses
the battle and falls upon his sword.
The speech is an affirmation that wars, civil and otherwise,
run amok. They defy attempts to keep them leashed. Professional
soldiers understand this discordant truth even while they try to
reduce its risks and exert as much control as they are able. During
the period when Americans committed themselves to combat in
what became a long and bloody struggle, those in power, those
 22 ♦ The Dogs of War

who started the war, seemed oblivious to those who might have
offered meaningful insights into what would ensue.
During the prologue to the Civil War, precious few military
“authorities” had the opportunity to offer counsel. Had the polit-
ical leaders in the United States and Confederate States heeded
them, they likely would have heard truth spoken to power. But in
a sad and anachronistic anticipation of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” no
one asked those who would have to fight this war what might
happen once the dogs of war were let slip.
One reason for this silence was the assumption that citizens
needed no help from presumed professionals in order to fight for
their country. Deep within the American psyche lives a “min-
uteman” tradition, the populist picture of the citizen soldier set-
ting down the plow and seizing a rifle to answer threats to the
community or country. Driving off bears or wolves, overwhelming
Native Americans, or sniping at redcoats as they marched through
the hinterlands, Americans were supposed to be native-born war-
riors disguised as civilians.1
And Americans inherited from England a fear of standing
armies in peacetime. Professional soldiers mean mischief, whether
they serve a king or queen or the ambitions of an “imperial” pres-
ident. Soldiering should simply be common sense applied to a
communal cause.
During the nineteenth century, the United States did try to
professionalize the military, establishing the Military Academy at
West Point in 1802 and the Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1845,
and retaining a small army and navy to patrol the frontier and
protect American coasts and waterways. West Point became a pre-
eminent engineering school at a time when the nation still needed
 War Dogs: 1861 and After ♦ 23

forts and was committing to developing roads, canals, and rail-

roads. Private military academies and state-sponsored institutions,
too, generated a small cadre of professional officers who made
careers of military service, one of the so-called hireling profes-
sions. When the United States and Confederate States went to war
in 1861, these few soldiers and sailors, some of whom had fought
in the war with Mexico fourteen years earlier, were the primary
authorities on warfare available.2
It is interesting and certainly significant that practically no one
in the administrations of either Lincoln or Davis asked these vet-
erans what might happen as Americans veered toward war. Besides
the “minuteman” tradition and populist approach to war, a likely
reason was the conviction that this crisis would provoke no war. If
war should somehow happen, then combat would last only
through one battle or campaign, and “our” side surely would win.
Since reality did not conform to such fantasies, it is worth
asking what the military experts thought about the impending
conflict. Here follows a sample of what those soon in command,
and those who would later emerge as consequential commanders,
believed they confronted in 1861.

♦♦♦

WINFIELD SCOTT was the commanding general of the United

States Army. His corpulent body was infirm, but his mind was still
sharp. Scott’s advice to the incoming administration—to seek
compromise at a humbling cost, to anticipate a long and bitter
war, or to allow the “wayward sisters” to depart in peace—only
provoked derision from politicians who thought Scott’s counsel
“too political.” When pressed for a plan with which to prosecute
 24 ♦ The Dogs of War

the war, Scott offered the Anaconda, the naval blockade of the
South’s principal ports. He would take advantage of superior
numbers and resources and squeeze the rebellion to death. But the
mobilization Scott had in mind would cost time and money, and
again the politicians objected. Against his much better judgment,
Scott presided over the disaster that was the First Battle of Bull
Run/Manassas.3

♦♦♦

SIMON CAMERON was secretary of war in Lincoln’s cabinet. Cam-

eron represented civilian control over the military and was about
as “civilian” as possible under these circumstances. He was secre-
tary of war because the president needed a Pennsylvanian in his
cabinet and because Cameron had delivered forty-four crucial
votes to Lincoln at a critical moment during the Republican nom-
inating convention in Chicago.
A printer by trade, Cameron had been a wheeler-dealer in
Pennsylvanian politics for most of his sixty-two years. Twice a
United States senator, he may have coined the saying “An honest
politician is one who, when he is bought, stays bought.” Yet Cam-
eron was supposedly among the principal supporters of William
H. Seward for the Republican nomination—until he abandoned
Seward for Lincoln on the second ballot. One rival described
Cameron as “corrupt as a dung hill.”
Cameron had wanted to be secretary of the treasury but
accepted the presumed lesser position because he could do no better.
Very soon he revealed that in addition to integrity, he also lacked
administrative competence. By July 1, 1861, the volunteer army had
swelled to 310,000 men. But the president had his treasury secretary,
 War Dogs: 1861 and After ♦ 25

Salmon P. Chase, assisted by a couple of generals, draw up a

table of organization for the new army. Lincoln found Cameron
“incapable either of organizing details or conceiving and ad-
vising general plans.” One member of Congress described Cam-
eron’s “system” when queried about an issue: “He would look
about, find a scrap of paper, borrow your pencil, make a note,
put the paper in one pocket of his trousers and your pencil in the
other.”
Cameron was able to obtain contracts for the purchase of
blind horses, weapons that failed to function, and knapsacks made
of shoddy (bits of compressed rags) that dissolved when rained
upon. The fact that the Lincoln administration included someone
so clueless about the war he was supposed to prosecute is a telling
index of the degree of seriousness with which it took the coming
conflict.4

♦♦♦

L E R OY P O P E W A L K E R ,
the Confederate secretary of war, was
essentially a more honest version of Simon Cameron. Walker had
his job because Jefferson Davis needed an Alabamian in his cab-
inet and because William Lowndes Yancey and Clement C. Clay,
two very prominent Alabamians, turned down the job. Yancey
recommended Walker, who was forty-four years old, a lawyer from
Huntsville, and very active in Alabama politics as a secessionist
Democrat. About military affairs Walker knew almost nothing.
But this was the man who offered to soak up in a single handker-
chief all the blood shed in any war that might transpire. And the
conventional wisdom was that President Davis would be his own
secretary of war anyway.
 26 ♦ The Dogs of War

Even before the Confederate government moved the capital

from Montgomery to Richmond during the spring of 1861,
Walker was in trouble. He and an undersized staff worked hard
and constantly but never seemed to accomplish anything. Walker
read letters and official paper and then tossed the material onto a
chair, where the pile rose to half-bushel proportions. Sometimes
Davis had to come in person into Walker’s office and root through
the stacks of documents to find one that he needed. Delegation
was not among Walker’s talents.
Of course Walker had a horde of people who needed to see
him. However, the principles of triage seemed beyond his under-
standing. Consequential visitors waited for days, while folk there
on trivial matters interrupted Walker at will. He walked to and
from his office by a circuitous route designed to avoid mendicants
as much as possible.
People in a position to know about Walker’s performance used
words like “at best inefficient,” “utterly incompetent,” “feeble,”
and “unfit” to describe the secretary. And Davis’s vice president,
Alexander H. Stephens, commented, “He’ll do and do and do and
at last do nothing.”5
Thus in the beginning neither the Union nor the Confederacy
had in place a secretary of war capable of managing a war. Cam-
eron and Walker were creatures of peacetime politics; neither of
them expected to encounter anything more hostile than an off-
year election.

♦♦♦

probably possessed the best credentials among

R O B E R T E. L E E

active American soldiers in 1861. Winfield Scott famously said of

 War Dogs: 1861 and After ♦ 27

Lee that he “was the very best soldier I ever saw in the field.” A
graduate of West Point (1829), Lee had been an outstanding engi-
neer and had served on Scott’s staff during the Mexican War. He
also had commanded the two companies of Marines that stormed
the fire engine house at Harpers Ferry in October 1859, captured
John Brown, and rescued Brown’s thirteen hostages unharmed.
Scott had offered Lee active command of the Union army in April
1861, prompting in part Lee’s agonizing decision to resign from
that army and subsequently join the Confederate army.
Lee had no illusions about the war he volunteered to fight. He
realized what course lay ahead. To his wife, Mary, he wrote, “I
take it for granted that our opponents will do us all the harm they
can. They feel their power & they seem to have the desire to op-
press & distress us. I assume therefore they will do it.”
Lee’s son Robert was at that time a student at the University
of Virginia and eager to join the army. Lee did not approve. “I
wrote to Robert that I could not consent to take boys from their
school & young men from their colleges & and put them in the
ranks at the beginning of a war when they are not wanted & when
there were men enough for the purpose. The war may last 10
years. Where are our ranks to be filled from then?”6

♦♦♦

was the officer in com-

P I E R R E G U S T A V E T O U T A N T B E A U R EG A R D

mand at Charleston who fired on Fort Sumter and so became the

first Southern “hero.” Called to Richmond to command the prin-
cipal army defending the Confederate capital, Beauregard offered
a “farewell address” to the people of Charleston in late May of
1861. Among other sentiments, he said:
 28 ♦ The Dogs of War

Whatever happens at first, we are certain to triumph at

last . . . a gallant and free people, fighting for their
independence and firesides, are invincible against even
disciplined mercenaries, at a few dollars per month.
What, then must be the result when its enemies are little
more than an armed rabble, gathered hastily on a false
pretence, and for an unholy purpose, with an octoge-
narian [Scott] at its head? None but the demented can
doubt the result.7

Beauregard seems to anticipate a struggle like the Revolution,

which of course lasted more than six years. What lay ahead was,
in his mind, no one-punch fight.

♦♦♦

GEORGE BRINTON McCLELLAN would soon succeed Winfield Scott

as military “savior of the Union.” McClellan had attended West
Point, served in the Mexican War, and observed the Crimean War.
He resigned from the army to manage a railroad in Ohio. When
war broke out, McClellan returned to the military and conducted
successful campaigns in western (now West) Virginia. His ad-
dresses to his troops as he commenced these campaigns reveal
McClellan’s huge ego—and limited vision of this war.
On May 26, 1861, he said that his mission was “to rescue our
brethren [in western Virginia] from the grasp of armed traitors.”
And he exhorted his men to “show mercy even to them when they
are in your power, for many of them are misguided.”
A month later, McClellan informed his men, “Bear in mind
that you are in the country of friends, not of enemies; that you are
 War Dogs: 1861 and After ♦ 29

here to protect, not to destroy.” Then he waxed Napoleonic: “Sol-

diers! I have heard that there was danger here. I have come to
place myself at your head and to share it with you.”
Here was a queer amalgam of martial bombast and the sort
of limited war Abraham Lincoln imagined: show the flag, and
watch the mass of white Southerners flock to salute it.8

♦♦♦

WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHER MAN graduated from West Point in

1840, served in the army for thirteen years, resigned to pursue
what became failed ventures in banking and law, and then in 1859
was named superintendent of the academy that later became Lou-
isiana State University. Intensely loyal to the Union, Sherman left
Louisiana and rejoined the United States Army in May 1861. He
believed the war might well last thirty years; indeed, it might con-
sume a half century and “involve the destruction of all able-bodied
men of this generation and go pretty deep into the next.” Sher-
man estimated casualties totaling 300,000 per year for quite some
time. He saw the conflict as one of order versus anarchy.9

♦♦♦

THOMAS JONATHAN JACKSON would soon become “Stonewall”—

hero, then martyr, of the Confederate cause. In January 1861,
Jackson was professor of natural and experimental philosophy
(physics) and artillery tactics at the Virginia Military Institute in
Lexington, Virginia. Jackson once asked a cadet to name the three
simple machines. The student responded, “The inclined plane,
the lever, and the wheel,” the correct answer. But Jackson said,
“No, sir.” The correct answer was the precise order in which the
 30 ♦ The Dogs of War

textbook listed the three simple machines: “the lever, the wheel,
and the inclined plane.” Small wonder that he was widely regarded
as eccentric; one cadet at VMI described Jackson as “a hell of a
fool.”
During the secession winter of 1860–61, Jackson wrote his
nephew, “I am in favor of making a thorough trial for peace, and
if we fail in this and the state is invaded to defend it with terrific
resistance—even to taking no prisoners. . . . [I]t becomes us to
wage such a war as will bring hostilities to a speedy close. People
who are anxious to bring on war don’t know what they are bar-
gaining for; they don’t see all the horrors that must accompany
such an event.”10

♦♦♦

was only days short of his fortieth birthday

U L Y S S E S S. G R A N T

when the Confederates fired upon Fort Sumter. A graduate of

West Point and a veteran of the war with Mexico, Grant resigned
from the army in 1854 and then failed as a farmer, salesman, can-
didate for county engineer, and customhouse clerk. In April 1861
he was working in a leather store and facing dim prospects for im-
proving his lot. In his memoirs Grant recalled, “My own views at
that time were like those officially expressed by Mr. [William H.]
Seward at a later day, that ‘the war would be over in ninety days.’ I
continued to entertain these views until after the battle of Shiloh.”
Of course, the Battle of Shiloh happened on April 6–7, 1862,
almost a year after the firing on Fort Sumter—nearly four times
those “ninety days” Grant projected the war would last. In the
spring of 1861, Grant’s actions seemed to support a belief in a
long war. He took care to wait for his best opportunity to serve
 War Dogs: 1861 and After ♦ 31

conspicuously and became a colonel in mid-June. After chairing a

meeting of Unionists in Galena, Illinois, called to respond to the
president’s call for volunteers, Grant never returned to the leather
store, either “to put up a package or do other business.”11

♦♦♦

led the initial attempt to thwart the Southern

I R V I N M c D OWE L L

rebellion in 1861. He was forty-three years old, a graduate of West

Point, a veteran of the Mexican War, and the consummate staff
officer. In contrast with Scott, McDowell was physically capable of
taking the field, and he had an influential patron in the secretary
of the treasury, Salmon P. Chase. But in twenty-three years in the
army, McDowell had never commanded anyone in combat.

♦♦♦

This is a mere sample of military opinion on the eve of the war.

Some of those cited were acknowledged authorities, or as nearly
so as existed on either side (Scott, Lee, McClellan, and Beauregard).
Others would emerge as important generals in the course of events
(Grant, Sherman, and Jackson). Still others were unavailable to
advise their governments even had anyone asked for their counsel.
For example, Albert Sidney Johnston, Henry Halleck, and James
Longstreet were all in the far West when the war began and had
yet to make their way across the country to join the conflict.
In effect, those possessed of the power to start the war were
not those who would actually do the fighting. In fact, most of those
who began the American Civil War had little or no experience
with combat and compounded their deficiency by failing to con-
sult those who had.12
Discovering Diverse Content Through
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könyve
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Title: Kánaán könyve

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 Megjegyzés:
A tartalomjegyzék a 103. oldalon található.
 KRÚDY GYULA

KÁNAÁN KÖNYVE

BUDAPEST
AZ ATHENAEUM IROD. ÉS NYOMDAI R.-T. KIADÁSA
1919
9426, – Budapest, az Athenaeum r.-t. könyvnyomdája.
 ELŐHANG.

Néhány kis, vidám és tragikus történet következik itt abból az

életből, amit az emberek a szerelmeskedésen kívül folytatnak.
Bizonyos korszakig, mondjuk az aranyszőlő-illatú negyvenedik
életévig, nem igen törődnek az írók egyéb mondanivalóval, mint a
szerelmi hangokkal. Legfontosabbnak látszik: a nők éjszeme és a
lovag boldogtalansága; nem egyszer a férjhezmenés vagy
megházasodás körül telik el az írói képzelet; máskor csak
házasságtörő hisztérikák és kicsapongó latrok érdeklik a mosdatlan
tollast.
„Hiszen szép a szerelem, – mondta például Kálnay László, akinek
állandóan két-három felesége volt, persze, balkézről; cvikkeres,
mélyhangú és kalucsnis férfiú volt, a pecsétgyűrűt a mutatóujján
hordta, mintha a nőket is hitelesíteni lehetne, mint a hordókat, – de
a legszebb kisasszonyt sem lehet legelni küldeni.“ Igy szólt és a
huszonegyes játékban nem egyszer előhívta tizenkilencre az alsót,
különösen akkor, ha arcfehérítő szappanra, kis téli ködmönre, vagy
bábaasszonyra volt szükségük a nőknek.
A később következő történetkékre némelyek mondhatják majd,
hogy az író késő vénségében fogalmazta őket, midőn cinikus volt,
mint egy beretválatlan szerzetes és a szentimentális szerelemnek
már annyit sem hitt, mint a sárgarigónak. Pá, szerelem, te elzsuppolt
vándorkomédiás; pá, őrjítő vágy, melynek jelenlétében úgy
szaladgált az alulírott, mint a kandúr, amelynek farkára égő papirost
kötnek.
 Hangzatok, amelyek a női nevekből kicsendülnek, Isten veletek.
Az Irmák budai télszagú neve, az Arankák strucctollas, legyezős
lengése, a Máriák égfelé fordított szemfehére, a Katinkák affektálása,
Juditok bibliai, színészkedő szenvedélye, Sárák anyáskodó, de
erőszakos csókja, a Margitok apácásan kopogó cipősarka a hátunk
mögött, női nevek álmodozó varázsa, – Isten veletek. Ezentúl csak
bor- és dohányszagú férfineveket vet papirosra a költő.
Elkövetkezik az életkor, midőn bizonyos közmondásokhoz igazodik
a férfiú.
Igy, például, mondogatni kezdi, hogy csak a vagabundok
soványak, rendes ember hasat ereszt. Egy kecsege-formájú férfiú
sohasem lehet a legjobb ügyvéd vagy a legbölcsebb bíró.
Magassarkú cipőt csak a parkett-táncosok viselnek. Színes
nyakkendőt csak a pénztelen csirkefogók. Krémszínű nadrágot a
pesti csepürágók. És holdvilágnál csak az elvetemült perszonák
bolyonganak hozzájuk illő ifjú betyárok karján, valamint a muzsikus-
cigányok, akiknek ez a keresetük. Aki az éjszakát álmatlanul tölti,
annak előbb-utóbb rossz vége lesz. És csak a borbélysegédek írnak
szerelmes levelet. Futóbolond epekedik elérhetetlen nő csókja után.
Semmittévő és műveletlen ember fecsérli idejét a nőknek való
céltalan udvarlásra. Csirkeagyvelejű férfiú az, aki megelégszik az
életből, annak javaiból a nők csacskaságával, emlékbe adott hajával,
elcsent zsebkendőjével, elfelejtett fehérneműjével, kézszorításával,
hangjával, felejthetetlen pillantásával. Okos embernek tudni kell,
hogy a nők sokkal gyengébbek, mint a férfiak: az álmaik és a
gondolataik, ha egyszer nyilvánosságra kerülnének, bízvást azt
eredményeznék, hogy egyetlen férfi sem akasztaná fel többé magát
boldogtalan szerelem miatt; a vágyaik és a szerelmi kívánságaik
elefánt-nagyságúak a férfi-érzéshez képest; és a lesütött szemekben
nemcsak Capulett Julia önfeláldozása, de Báthory Erzsébet
vérszomja is tükröződik.
Pá, elmerengő séta a hársak alatt, hegymászás és hosszadalmas
gyaloglás, fáradalmas utazás, váróterembeli éjszakázás,
szívdobogásos randevú, ugrás az első emeletről és tébolyult
menekülés az erdőben a házőrző komondorok elől.
Pá, életmegrontás nőkért, pályaváltoztatás, hitehagyottság,
rabszolgaság és a valódi természet elsikkasztása. Pá, te piros halál,
amelyet egy hölgyi fotográfia társaságában kerestünk; Isten veled,
lehajtott fejjel való kullogás a külvárosban, vasúti sínre fektetett
nyak, midőn az expressz közeledik és a legmagasabb fa kiválasztása
a budai hegyek között, amelyen egész télen el lehet lógni, amíg
tavasszal lenge ruhácskáját bontogatja a szőke szerelem a fa alatt s
ekkor a szerelmesek nyakába lehet zuhanni.
Ég veled, mennybéli szűzességű, drága ifjúság. Aladin
csodalámpásának fényében megjelenő házasságos élet,
aranylakodalom után áhítozó öregség.
 MAGYAR HASAK.

Az étkezés kultusza nem egyszer felülmúlja a nő és a szerelem

jelentőségét: csak a fiatal hátgerincnek való a nők körül való
forgolódás, míg a nemzet törzsei, a férfiak, elszélesednek, mint a
tölgyfák és a csontrendszer és a test alkata leginkább üldögéléshez
idomul, amint a régi magyarok csontvázán ez pontosan észlelhető.
Ama tekintélyes, hosszú szárnyas-kabát, amelyet Magyarországon a
megállapodott férfiak közönségesen viselnek, (amelyet Ferenc
József-kabátnak is neveznek, míg ha magyaros cifrák díszítik: hívják
Deáknak vagy kántor-kabátnak), a szabóknak előrelátható
találmánya a növekedő emésztési helyek és részek befödésére. Nem
is lehetett egy fecskefarkos, úrfi-kabátos úriemberből alispán. Has
nélkül akár a világra se jött volna a közéleti magyar. A
keszegemberek még a nőknek sem tetszenek. Szép, kövér
emberekre várnak a stallumok és gazdag özvegyek. Ki hitt volna a
sovány bírónak, kecsege papnak, agárhátú fiskálisnak? A férfiak
bizottsága már karakterbeli szükségesség volt. Csak a soványokat
akasztották fel. Rendes emberről külön vett mértéket az asztalos,
amikor kiterítették.
Ez a heptikás írói nemzedék, a bánatos tintanyalók és az Otthon-
körbeli gavallérok honnan is tudták, hogy Magyarországon hasat illik
ereszteni még a költőnek is? Petőfi, ha életben marad, bizonyosan
olyan széles derekú ember lett volna, mint Arany vagy Vörösmarty.
Amint a jó alispánnak testi terjedelmével alaposan be kellett tölteni
vala a széket, a koszorús költőhöz is illett némi férfias korpulencia.
Hiába erőlködik vala Virág Benedek vagy Tompa Mihály a nemzetbeli
osztatlan népszerűségre. Aki fogyó hold-szerű arcképüket látta,
bizony kiábrándul a versek írójából. Csak a vagabundok halnak meg
soványan Magyarországon, a mihasznák, a betegek, az elvetemült
lumpok. Nem is volt hitele egy hasatlan embernek. Hogyan lehetne
tisztességes, megbízható, szavahihető férfi, aki egy országban
soványan marad.
Milyen szép hasak voltak!
A főtisztelendő klérus körében a kerek, cipóhasak voltak
föltalálhatók, míg a bíráknak, ügyvédeknek, hatósági embereknek
hegyes hasuk volt, mint a dárda, amellyel megdöfték az igazságot
vagy a gonosztevőt. Mint a tömlők lógtak a mamelukok hasai, míg a
szélsőbaloldalon oly kemény dombok emelkedtek, amelyek a régi
világban verekedésnél is hasznosak voltak; a hassal való lökdösést
ismerték a perzekutorok, mikor a rabvallatás folyt. Milyen szép
hasakat neveltek a házasemberek! Hogy elgömbölyödtek az arcok és
a fejek, midőn a férfiú megfelelő hivatalhoz jutott! Mily megható volt
a testi pihenés és nyugodalom végig a hosszú életen, mintha senki
sem lett volna beteg Magyarországon. Mindenkinek meg volt az
ennivalója, bora és kényelmes ágya. A regények boldogtalan
szerelmeseiről a méhes ebédutáni döngicsélésében, vagy a régi
divatlapokkal, élces ujságokkal, Vasárnapi Ujságbeli képekkel
teleragasztott kamarában egy megsárgult ujság tárcarovatából
értesült a jóravaló ember; a lugasban savanyú víz meg kertibor hült,
amíg a gazda fejcsóválva forgatta az újító költők bolondos füzeteit.
A régi magyarországbeli élet nem a változatosságra, hanem a
jóságos hosszadalmasságra volt berendezve. A gondtól senkinek sem
hullott ki a haja, mert a gondon könnyen lehetett segíteni. Teli
gyomorral senki se ment a folyónak, ebédután szundikált az ember,
nem gondolt az öngyilkosságra. A kerekre hízott asszonyok egy
hosszú életen át egyébre se gondoltak, mint arra, hogy mit főzzenek
ebédre, – ez a gondolatvilág nem alkalmas a női léhaság és
könnyelműség ébredezésére. A spájzok, kamarák, konyhák,
rendesen megfoltozott fehérneműek megnyugtatták a férfiakat az
asszonyok hűségéről. Csak ott volt szemetes az udvar, ahol a nőknek
gondolata messze csavargott a háztól, mint éjjel a macska. Egy
derék asszony nem is ügyelhetett egyébre, mint a háztartására, –
hisz annyi gondja, vesződsége volt szegénynek, hogy társaságba
jutván, nem is tudott egyébről beszélgetni: – így hallotta, látta ezt
már az anyjától, nagyanyjától. Az asszonyok összeültek és
megtárgyalták a háztartásbeli bajokat, eseményeket. Míg a férfiak
nyugodtan szívták pipáikat. Kinek jutna eszébe a féltékenység,
amikor az asszony cselédeiről panaszkodik?
A háború előtt mintha nem is lett volna szegény ember
Magyarországon. Minden kémény füstölt és harangszóra mindenütt
ebédet tálaltak. Az volt a legszerencsétlenebb ember, akinek sehol
sem terítettek. A testi megelégedettség érmetszője, az elhibázott
magyar politika egészségi szempontból is szükséges volt. Hiszen, ha
a politika sem lett volna, mindenkit megütött volna a guta a jóléttől.
A nemzeti energia és a vér lecsapolódott. A vérmes indulatok
kitombolódtak. Senkinek sem rontotta el az étvágyát a politikai
szenvedély.
Tejjel-mézzel folyó Kánaán, hová lettél?
Vajjon következnek-e még századok Magyarországon, amikor
csendesen emésztett a nemzet, erejét gyűjtögette, hosszan pihent,
lassan, meggondolva élt, erős fiúkat nevelt, szép lányokat hoztak a
gólyák és mindenki jóllakott étellel, igével, csöndes politizálással?
Úgy nézem, hogy a tunya, üldögélő, nagyokat evő magyar élet a
történelem könyvébe kerül. A férfigerincek elszoktak a hosszú
háború alatt a tölgyfás megállapodottságától. Ruganyos, zenebonás,
nyugtalan életmód következik. A szép, kövér embereknek
befellegzett.
 JÓZSEFNAPI VENDÉGEK.

Abban a kalendáriumban, amely minden magyar házban egykor a

szép hosszú élet naplója volt, József napján kezdődnek a fontosabb
feljegyzések. A gazda – minden valamire való ember gazda volt
Magyarországon – cselédeit fogadta, megújította velük a
szövetséget. Az emberek a tavaszt látták az égen, a földön és a
szívekben. Az élet kezdete, hosszú tél vége, a nyíló esztendő várható
reményeinek íze: ez volt József napja. A templom elnéptelenedik e
naptól kezdve, a föld népe künn a földeken tiszteli Istenét.
Drágalátos világa egy messze multnak.
Most az amazonok országára nyílik a tavaszi nap szeme. A férfiak
olyan régen távol vannak tanyáiktól, falvaiktól, földi életüknek
lombjaitól, amilyen soká még nem is voltak el odahazulról.
Asszonyok és gyermekek keze és ereje megnövekedett három
esztendő alatt, mint a fecskefiók megtanulja a repülést, a galamb a
bukfencet, a vak ember a hegedülést. Az amazonok és gyermekeik
megtámogatják a kunyhót, megmívelik a földet, tiszteletben tartják
az apák erényeit, amíg a férfiak hazajönnek. A nagy mérlegen, ahol
az országok súlyát mérik, Szűz Mária országa egy-két lattal nyom
kevesebbet a háromesztendős hadjárat óta. A magyar földek és
szívek inkább helyükön vannak, mint bármikor. Kétségbeesés és
panasz nélkül múlik egyik bibliai esztendő a másik után. Az
amazonok erősen fogják az ekeszarvát; a hadjárat az ország
belsejéből csak a férfiakat vitte el, de a magyar föld csodálatos
ereje, gazdagsága és a megpróbáltatásokat a tavaszi szántás
megújhodó ifjúságával elbíró kitartása: itthon maradt, táplál,
vigasztal, reménységet ajándékoz. József napján lekerülnek a szegről
a régi kalendáriumok és a tavaszi élet, bár férfiak nélkül, elkezdi a
csodálatos folyamatot, mint a jég alól felszabadult folyók, szelek,
fellegek. A háború, mint egy bába, a világra segített egy új magyar
generációt, a férfi nélküli asszonyok nemzedékét, akik férjük helyett
a mezei földet ölelik, cicomázás helyett gyümölcsfát oltogatnak és
gyermekszülés helyett jószágot nevelnek. A természeti erő, amelyet
a szerelem azelőtt a nőkből elfoglalt, mind munkaerővé változott.
Igaz, hogy daltalan, néma lett az ország, az énekes madarak is
hallgatagok és eltűntek a régi kis virágos falusi kertek, a pünkösdi
rózsa helyére veteményt ültetnek; lakzi-muzsika semerről sem
mormog, a furulya-szó a multak emléke és az üveges kevesebb
tükröt ad el: – de élünk és nyílunk, mint a repkény a régi vár falán.
A józsefnapi vendégek: a tavaszi munkák eljöttek Magyarországra
és megtalálják az amazonok izmos karjait, gyermekek korán
bekérgesedett tenyerét. A gólyákkal, fecskékkel hazajöhetnek a
férfiak is: rendben lelik itthon az országot.
 FOGADÓ A RÉGI VILÁGHOZ.

1914-ben még korcsma-illat volt Magyarországon.

Származott a korcsma-illat a különböző borjú- és
marhapörköltöktől, amelyek paprikától pirosan, hagymától szagosan,
frissen csapolt, aranyhajú csipkefodros ser társaságában várták
gabelfrüstökre az utazót, a legkisebb vendégfogadóban is.
Az önmagába révült nászutasok; a boldogtalanság elől futó
tétova utazók; az életet, nőt és játékot megúntak; a szórakozottak; a
hangulatosok; a nők után csavargó kalandosok; a szilajok és a
melankólikusok; valamint az ínyesek, akik azért utaztak, mert tudtak
egy korcsmát a felvidéken vagy délfelé, ahol valamely ételt valamely
különösséggel készítettek, – de a mesterségből, pénzkeresés céljából
utazók is: nyugodtan szállottak meg a magyarországi fogadókban,
enni, inni mindig lehetett e helyeken, amelyek a Magyar Koronához,
az Arany Bikához, a Zöldfához, a Bárányhoz, Hungáriához, a
Tiszához és egyéb ser- és virstli-illatú, kedvderítő nevekhez voltak
címezve. Az utazás nemcsak annak ígért változatosságot, aki Sir
John Falstaff módjára papiros-darabokra jegyezte fel a
korcsmárosnők és szobalányok nevét az északi kerületekben, hanem
elmulattatta akár a nagyehető Pickwick úr társaságát, akár pedig azt
a méla fiatalembert, aki női ideálokat keres a vidéki fotografus
kirakatában, a fogadó előtti térség hetivásárjában, a Nepomuki
szobra körül a felvidéki hidakon és az esti korzó ismeretlen hölgyei
között.
A messzi történelmi időkben, a háború előtt, vidékre utazni még
akkor is szívringató cselekedet volt, ha nem várta az embert a
gólyafészkes ház és a lugasban pipázó atyafi (régi Vasárnapi Ujság
címlapjáról). Az elmult vidéki vendégeskedésről majd írunk egyszer,
ha élünk, most csak a fogadóknál maradjunk, amelyeknek cégére,
setétes folyosója, döngő kapualja, bolthajtásos ebédlője, kipirult
arcú fogadósnéja, vendégsége olyan messze van tőlünk, mint egy
emlékkönyv, megfakult sorai. A régi utazó, aki a magyarországi
vendégfogadókban oly ismerős volt, hogy setét éjszaka is névszerint
köszöntötték a pályaudvaron a nyalka hotel-portások, az omnibuszok
aranysapkás hivatalnokai; a tekintélyes derekú, fehérmellényes
„főurak“ a kávéházban felszólítás nélkül átnyújtották a frakkjuk
zsebéből a házi cigaretta-csomagot; az ezüstfejű, tiszta fehérneműs,
borukat nyelvükön szürcsölgető, konyhájukra hiú, üzleti
becsületességükre féltékeny fogadósok kis selyemsapkájukat a
kezükbe vették és örvendeztek a parolának; a bérszolgát többnyire
Antonnak nevezték és az ablak ódon templomra nyilott, ahol
vasárnapi reggelen oly tiszta áhítattal szólaltak meg a harangok,
hogy az ember feloldozva érezte magát régebbi bűnei alól és a
városbeli elbolondított nők helyett inkább szentéletű lelkész-
ismerőseire gondolt: – a régi utazó, ha manapság megszáll a
Bikákban, Bárányokban, Koronákban, éjféltáján bízvást úgy érezheti
magát, mint Boz félszemű vigécének a nagybátyja az edinburghi
kimustrált postakocsik között. Itt is életre kelnek a kísértetek
órájában a fehérre terített asztalokon a hatalmas sültek a hízott ökör
húsából, sárga, zsírral bőven öntözött kappanok szaladgálnak a
tévelygő lábai alatt, a virágkosárral ékesített porcellán levesestál
párologva száll át a levegőn és a kékszegélyű tányér hátán megfeni
az evőkést a kiéhezett utas, miután a szalvétát gallérjához dugta.
Egyszerre megnépesedik a terem a jókedvű ebédelőkkel. Különböző
asztaltársaságok gyülekeznek össze a város szétszórt részeiből. A
sarokasztaloknál tisztaarcú, színes nyakkendőjű agglegények ülnek
immár húsz esztendeje, akik a pecsétgyűrűt a kisujjukon viselik.
Mindig ugyanazzal a tréfás megszólítással köszöntik egymást és a
malacfejjel, szárnyassal díszített étlapot nyelvcsettintve veszik a
kezükbe, míg a régi pincér előhozza a fogvájóval megjelölt
savanyúvizes üveget, az ebédelőtt vagy ebédután beveendő
orvosságot, a megszokott mustárt és a törzsvendég többféle
szertartásos eszközét, mint a betűvel ellátott poharat, a karikával
átfűzött asztalkendőt, a háromdeci borok csillogva elfoglalják
helyüket, míg a megyei és városi urak hosszú asztalánál a ser járja,
amelynek szőkesége ilyenkor szebb bármely asszonyi hajnál. A
„ringlik“, hagymás halak, félvirstlik zaftban, perecek, sóskiflik és
császárzsemlyék vidám tréfák, gondtalan évődések között
fogyasztatnak. Fölebbvaló és alantas szívbeli jóbarát, polgármester
és felesketett irnok tegeződnek, az alispán nem csak bírája
tisztviselőinek, de atyja is. A déli sernél elsímulnak a hivatalbeli
surlódások, barátok, testvérek ők valamennyien. Amott jön zöld
kalapjában, macskanadrágjában, agarával a falusi földbirtokos, akit
hangos örömmel fogadnak mindenfelé. Szívélyesen nyúlnak elébe a
kezek, a fogadós személyesen hozza a frissen csapolt sert. Ő
elmondja, hogy milyen lesz a termés, – sohase elég jó – majd
meghallgatja a városbeli újságokat. Amott egyéb asztaltársaságok
helyezkednek el. Van „Dugó“-asztal, színészek, hírlapírók, széplelkű
polgárok asztala. A tanárok külön ülnek. És a katonatisztek
ünnepélyesen és feszesen köszöntik egymást. Vidám ebédlő-kedv,
gondtalan, elsímult arcok, jókedvű kupecek, elméskedő vigécek,
megelégedett kereskedők: mindenfelé.
És egyre szól a fogadó harangja. Még mindig jönnek az új
vendégek a Blasini gyorskocsijával, az omnibusszal, a falusi kocsival,
a lóvonattal; jönnek a régi vidám törzsvendégek vissza a messzi
csataterekről, a nedves sírokból, volhiniai nádasokból, szomjasok és
éhesek, tehát nyomban jóillatú kenyeret sóznak és paprikáznak,
amíg a májgombócos levest az asztalra hozzák a megszokott, kedves
pincérek.
Mikor pedig egyet üt az óra, a régi utazó felnyitja szemét a régi
fogadóban. Ehetetlen kenyérbe ütközik a keze, idegen katonák ülnek
a régi törzsasztalnál, sovány, zsírtalan a konyha és a szél süvölt, mint
a temetőben. A fogadói szobában fényes délben kukorékol a kakas,
mert már ő sem tudja, hány óra van.
 A VENDÉG AZ EBÉDLŐBEN.

Az egykori Griff helyén épült vendégfogadóban évekkel ezelőtt –

háború előtt – a vidéki vendégeket már a második, harmadik pohár
sernél találta a déli harangszó; mire a József-utcai verestorony
harangjainak hangjai a háztetők felett összeölelkeztek a ferenci
barátok harangjaiéval, a vendég gallérjába gyömöszölte az
asztalkendőt és nagyon csodálkozott volna, ha nem hozzák vala a
konyha felől a párolgó húslevest. Esztendőkig jártunk ide ebédelni,
de sohasem érkezhettünk eléggé korán, hogy a konyha jobb falatjait
el ne fogyasztották volna a reggel óta strázsáló vidékiek.
Velőscsontot, „bein-fleist“, a levesben főtt zöldséget, különösen a
kalarábét, töpörtyűs túróscsuszát a későn kelő pesti embernek egy
nappal előbb kellett megrendelni a meghitt pincérnél, (akit a vicces
vendégek pincésnek, pincőrnek, pincellérnek is neveztek, aszerint,
melyik lábukkal keltek fel reggel). Még a fogadóban lakó Szemere
Miklós is úgy védelmezte mindennapi levesben-főtt marhahúsát
(paradicsom-mártással), hogy féltizenkét órakor intézkedett, midőn a
provincia már türelmetlenül verte a késheggyel a pohár oldalát az
ebédlőben. – No de végül mindenki jóllakott, pompásan
emésztettünk, egymásnak megbocsátottunk, az ebédutáni
hangulatban üzletező ravasz emberektől be hagytuk magunkat
csapni és az ötkoronás pénzdarabból, amelyet a könnyelmű, pazarló
és a szegényekháza sorsára jutó gavallér az ebéd céljaira mellénye
zsebébe eresztett, még vissza is adott a fizetőpincér, aki olyan kövér
és barátságos volt, hogy legendák maradtak róla. (Ezek a régi
Adolfok, Gyulák, Pisták: vajjon visszabújnak-e még valaha az elárvult
frakkokba, amelyekben őrangyalként sétálgattak a gondtalan
törzsvendég körül?)
 Az új Griffben, ebben a barátságos házban, hol vidéki életemet
egykor vidékiesen folytathattam, mintha a szomszédban volnék,
atyafiaknál, néhanapján megjelent egy kappan-hájas, kopaszodó,
negyven-ötven esztendős falusi gavallér, gummitalpú, fűzős,
kanárisárga cipőben, setétzöld ruhában és vadkacsatollas kalapban.
A vidéki urak egyenruhája volt ez hajdanán; viselték a
macskanadrágot, midőn már többé soha se mentek vidékre, mint a
megyei irnokok tartották a vizslakutyát, midőn már felhagytak a
vadászattal.
A vidéki gavallérnak barkója volt, nyírott bajusza, és a barnás,
drótszerű hajzat között látható kopaszság azt a véleményt
ébresztette bennem, hogy fiskális valamely mezővárosban.
(Szerettem egykor kitalálni idegen emberek foglalkozását, jellemét,
szívbeli hangulatát a fogadók ebédlőiben, midőn a sarokasztaltól
szemügyre vettem őket. Szerettem volna tudni, hogy mit csinálnak,
mikor egyedül vannak a szobájukban, milyen mozdulatokat tesznek,
tipegnek, topognak, nyögnek, sóhajtanak, vakaróznak és a
házastársak mit beszélgetnek egymás között. De legfőképen azt
szerettem volna tudni, hogy mit gondolnak magukban. Kis játék volt
ez, amint a nők kártyát vetnek, midőn egyedül vannak.)
A vidéki gavallérnak köszönhettem ez időben, hogy elmaradozó
étvágyam visszatért.
A hagyományok szerint voltak olyan gusztussal és étvággyal evő
emberek Magyarországon, akiket az ország másik végéből elvittek
gyomorbeteg úriemberek mulattatására, gyógyítására. A híres evő
majdnem olyan jelentékeny férfiú volt a nemzeti közéletben, mint a
nagy ivó. Szükség volt reá, mint a politikában a rettenthetetlen
kortesre, a börzén az éleshangú kontreminőrre, a képviselőházban a
megrendelt közbeszólásra. Az én ismeretlen barátom, ha néhány
évtizeddel előbb születik, mikor még tejjel-mézzel folyó Kánaán volt
ez az ország, bizonyára megélt volna az evési tehetségéből.
Amint a levesét fűszerezte mellényzsebéből elővett szárított
cseresznye-paprikával, amint az első kanállal a szájába vett a
húsléből, amint kenyérhéjat vegyített a leves tésztájába: már
látszott, hogy szakemberrel van dolgunk, aki soha se látogat el
Amerikába, ahol állítólag állva és gyorsan esznek a vendégek.
Asztalkendővel fedett mellét jól neki vetette az asztalnak, amíg a
levest kanalazta, hogy az ebédlő legtávolabbi zugába is elhallatszott
a szörtyögés. Bizonyosan megmondták neki is gyermekkorában,
hogy nem illik a levest hangosan szürcsölni, ámde az ember elfelejti
a gyermekkori leckét. Közben a kanállal többször megkeverte a
levest, mint a sörivó megrázza a maradékot a korsó fenekén. Aztán
felemelte egyik kezével a tányért és a leves végét a kanálba öntötte.
Bajuszát megtörölte, kenyeret kapott be s negyven cseppet ivott
tisztán az asztali borból. Szemét körüljártatta, mint a birkózó, fogait
megnyalogatta, mint a tigris, amíg a pincér andalogva közeledett a
sülttel. A pecsenyés-tálat vadul maga elé ragadta, mintha az
ellenkeznék vele. A villával és késsel gyorsan egyforma darabokra
szeldeste a húst, miközben láthatólag megbocsátott. Aztán
jobbkezével a villát fogta, húst és kenyeret mártogatott a zsírba, a
burgonyát, vagy egyéb főzeléket is ügyesen felvette a hatalmas
villára, majd egészséges, lapátszerű fogai mögé dobta a zsákmányt.
Az állcsontok hatalmasan dolgoztak, mozogni kezdett a fül, majd a
fejbőr, kipirult az orr, könnybelábbadt a szem, elfulladt a lélegzet…
míg a balkéz ezalatt egyhangú serény munkával kavargatta a
fejessalátát, amelyet néha-néha ecettel, mustárral, franciával és
angollal, majd olajjal ellátott, nem kímélvén a sót, paprikát, borsot
sem, hisz a vendéglői asztali edényeknek kis fegyvertára volt előtte;
a legutolsó asztalon észrevett egy magános barna üveget,
amilyenben a Maggi nevű gyomorbolondító folyadék szokott helyet
foglalni: gyorsan magához parancsolta és a salátára öntötte. –
Mintha a sült csupán alárendelt szolgája lett volna a salátának, akit
előre küldtek kvártélycsinálás végett. A fejessaláta (burgonya és
uborka hasonló megtiszteltetésben részesült) ünnepélyesen
fogyasztatott el emberünk által, miközben, hogy az egyik kéz
dologtalanul ne maradjon, villára szúrt kenyérdarabkával a
pecsenyés-tálat tisztára törölgette.
 Miért mondjam el a túróscsusza történetét? Emberünk vadsága
csupán az utolsó túrómorzsaléknál látszott csillapodni, amelyet
ujjával vett ki már a tálból.
Megtöltötte a vizespoharat félig borral, félig savanyúvízzel, egy
hajtásra leöblítette. Keményfából készült fogvájót döfött fogai közé
és öklelő tekintettel végignézett az ebédlőn.
Bizonyosan undorodott az evők mohó étvágyától.
 A BORÁSZ.

Egy kalendáriumi feljegyzés szerint Kerkápoly úrnak, Eötvös

Károly szerint: a legokosabb magyar embernek termett a legjobb
bora hazánkban. Termett ez a bor a Sashegyen, öreg urak még ittak
belőle és olyan elragadtatással emlékeznek reá, mint első
kedvesükre. A régi boldog szerelmek közül való Andrássy Manó
hegyaljai bora, amely után ugyancsak száraz kortyok maradtak, mint
aranylakodalmon a nászéjszaka emléke. Bizonyos borok (a szőlők
kipusztulásával) végleg eltűntek a magyar ember poharából, a
filokszéra pusztítását, amely gyermekkoromban olyan szomorúvá
tette Magyarországot, mint a tatárjárás, nem tudták pótolni az
amerikai vesszők. Jégszürke fejű, veremhangú, száraz lóbőr módjára
nyikorgó lépésű emberek már manapság azok a magyarok, akik még
emlékeznek Magyarország boldog éveire, amikor a bort gödrökbe
eresztették elegendő edény hiányában, ivott belőle a vándorlegény;
megmerítették rongyos kalapjukat a kóborlók, akik valamikor nagy
számmal lődörögtek a hazai országutakon, amint látszólagosan
minden különösebb cél és tennivaló nélkül mentek egyik
országrészből a másikba, elviselték a háznál található ócska ruhákat,
pepitanadrágokat (midőn a gazda már megvénült), madárijesztő
köpenyegeket, divatját mult kürtőkalapot, s főként a sok régi csizmát
és cipőt. A bor lefolyt a szőlőhegyről, ihatott belőle boldog,
boldogtalan, még mindig maradt annyi belőle, hogy szekeren
északfelé szállítsák kaftános kereskedők, akiknek herbergje Tokajban
(a tűzvész előtt) egyik legnagyobb bor-börzéje volt Európának. A
cárok festője, a magyar Zichy nem hiába illusztrálta a boroshordót a
legvidámabb társaságban, táncoló fiatal nők, nevető öregek,
bohócok és barátok körében: a bor körül mindig jókedvű emberek
sürgölődtek. A jókedélyű korcsmáros, a tréfás borkereskedő, a
pirosarcú vincellér, a duplaorrú borászati felügyelő (többnyire
levitézlett urak állomása), a legkülönbözőbb élcekkel, vidám
mondásokkal, jellemző kiszólásokkal felszerelt, már életükben szinte
anekdóta-kinccsé válott „borászok“, ezek az országos hírű szakértők,
akik behúnyták a szemüket, amikor a bort kóstolták, nyelvükön
megforgatták, szürcsölték, harapták, szagolták, ölelgették, lenyelték
vagy kiköpték: – immár mind a multak emlékei. Eltűntek a
vörhenyeges színű kabátok, vadászkalapos, tarkamellényes urak,
akiknek bibircses arcán az ország pincéinek leltára volt felírva, akik
szekeren utaztak északról délre, a Dunántúlról Erdélybe bort
kóstolni, bortvenni, amikor leesett az első hó és a pincéket
kiszellőztették, a sárga homokban fekvő üvegeket friss homokkal
látták el, krétával felírták a hordóra: Anno Domini… a kis hordókat
feltöltötték, a lopót kimosták, a csapot megigazították, követ
hengerítettek a helyre, ahová a nagymama elásta a Kossuth-bankót
vagy az ősapa a Libertást: kezdődött tél, jöttek a borászok, a
vendégek, az utazók, a pincének rendben kellett lenni. Jöttek a téli
hajnalok, amikor a kemence tegnapi melegét árasztotta és a
lámpafény még az esti sajt maradékait világította meg az asztalon,
de a gazda már útrakelt, vásárra, vonatra, lakodalomba, fiskálishoz
vagy bűbájos asszonyhoz… künn dühöng a téli fergeteg, amely
farkasjárta vidékké változtatja a falvakat, eltemeti az országutakat,
madárijesztőket és vándorlólegényeket… a gazda asztalhoz ül és
hideg pecsenyét, kolbászt, sódart falatoz az útra és jeges bort iszik
tetejébe, amely hűti és ápolja a belső részeket, amelyek a zsíros
vacsorában kifáradtak… Mily jó volt a bor – másnap, reggelig tartó
muzsikálások után, midőn az őszi, hallgatag, méla délutánban nagy
sétát tett az egészségére vigyázó ember, hogy egy messzi csárdát
elérhessen az országúton vagy a városvégén, ahol birsalma-illata
volt a belső szobának, a korcsmáros öreganyja haldoklott az ágyban,
amíg a menyecskét, leányt megölelgette a vendég, ki pohárban itta
borát, vagy kuglizással izzasztotta petyhüdt izmait, Kálnay László
öreg ügyvéd úr fejből mondogatta el Tompa Mihály mélabús verseit,
a Nyír nagyot ásított az őszi alkonyatban, megannyi fázékony
vénleányok a látóhatáron a jegenyefák… és a kerti bort csendesen
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