THE HUMOUR OF MARK TWAIN.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."] Sin,—I note that a dinner was given to Mark Twain by the Authors' Club on Monday night. I have the greatest admiration for Mark Twain as a humourist of a high order, and one whose lips have uttered nothing base, but I cannot say that the report of his speech is inspiring. A propos of Mark Twain's recent after-dinner speeches, may I quote one of his happiest flights of humour ? It is contained in a speech made at a Union Veterans' Banquet at Baltimore many years ago. The speech describes Mark Twain's doings during " When your secretary invited me to this reunion of the Union Veterans of Maryland he requested me to come prepared to clear up a matter which he said had long been a subject of dispute and bad blood in war circles in this country,—to wit, the true dimen- sions of my military services in the Civil War, and the effect which they had upon the general result. I recognise the impor- tance of this thing to history, and I have come prepared. Here are the details. I was in the Civil War two weeks. In that brief time I rose from private to Second Lieutenant. The monumental feature of my campaign was the one battle which my command fought, it was in the summerof '61. If I do say it, it was the bloodiest battle ever fought in human history ; there is nothing approaching it for destruction of human life in the field, if you take into consideration the forces engaged and the proportion of death to survival. And yet you do not even know the name of that battle. Neither do I. It had a name, but I have forgotten it. It is no use to keep private information which you can't show off. In our battle there were just fifteen men engaged on our side,—all Brigadier-Generals but me, and I was a Second Lieutenant. On the other side there was one man. He was a stranger. We killed him. It was night, and we thought he was an army of observa- tion ; he looked like an army of observation,—in fact, he looked bigger than an army of observation would in the day time ; and some of us believed he was trying to surround us, and some thought he was going to turn our position, and so we shot him. Poor fellow, he probably wasn't an army of observation, after all, but that wasn't our fault ; as I say, he had all the look of it in that dim light. It was a sorrowful circumstance, but he took the chances of war, and he drew the wrong card; he overestimated his fighting strength, and he suffered the likely result; but he fell as the brave should fall—with his face to the front and feet to the field—so we buried him with the honours of war, and took his things. So began and ended the only battle in the history of the world where the opposing force was utterly exterminated, swept from the face of the earth,—to the last man. And yet, you don't know the name of that battle; you don't even know the name of that man. Now, then, for the argument. Suppose I had continued in the war, and gone on as I began, and exterminated the opposing force every time—every two weeks—where would your war have been ? Why, you see yourself, the conflict would have been too one-sided. There was but one honourable course for me to pursue, and I pursued it. I withdrew to private life, and gave the Union cause a chance. There, now, you have the whole thing in a nutshell; it was not my presence in the Civil War that determined that tremendous contest—it was my retire- ment from it that brought the crash. It left the Confederate side too weak."
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