One day, an infantry brigade on the march to Chancellorsville had halted to rest on the pike, near where a narrow road turned off. A cavalryman was seen approaching, in a fast gallop, plainly, in a great hurry. The infantry viewed his approach with great interest, prepared to salute him with neat and appropriate remarks as he passed, by way of making him lively.
Just before he got to the head of the brigade he reached the narrow road and started up it. Instantly a dozen "infants" began to wave their arms excitedly, and shout in loud earnest voices--"Mister, stop there! don't go a step farther; for heaven's sake _don't_ go up that road." The trooper, startled by this appeal, and the warning gestures of the men, approaching him, pulled in his fast-going horse, and stopped, very impatiently. He said in a sharp tone, "What is the matter, why mustn't I go up this road? Say quick, I'm in a big hurry." "Don't go, we beg you; you'll never come back alive." "Humph! is that so?" said this trooper (who had been near breaking a blood vessel in his impatience at being stopped, but cooled off a little, at this ominous remark)--"But what's ahead? what's the danger? The road seems quiet?" "Well, Sonny, _that's_ the danger. Haven't you heard about it?" "Now, Sonny," was a term of endearment, which from an "infant" always exasperated the feelings of a cavalryman to the last degree; turned the milk of kindness in a horseman's breast into the sourest clabber; and it instantly stirred up this trooper. "Look here men, don't fool with me. Tell me what is the danger up this road," "Well! we thought we ought to let you know, before you expose yourself. General Hill has offered a reward of Five Dollars for a dead man with spurs on, and if you go up that lonesome road some of these here _soldiers_ will shoot you to get the reward." "Oh pshaw!" cried the disgusted victim, clapping spurs to his horse, and away he rode, leaving the grinning and delighted "infants" behind, and leaving, too, his _opinion_ of them, and their joke, in language that needed no interpreter.
This sort of thing was going on, all the time. The infantry and artillery _would_ do it. With many, particularly the artillery, who knew better, it was _only joking_, the soldier-instinct to stir up _any_ passer-by. But with many, especially the infantry, who were not as much "up to snuff" as the artillery, these gibes at the cavalry expressed a serious, tho' mistaken idea, they had of them. Upon the advance of the enemy, of course, we were accustomed to see cavalrymen hurrying in from the outposts to the rear, to report. So the thoughtless infantry, not considering that this was "part of the large and general plan," got fixed in their minds an association between the two things,--the advance of the enemy, and, the rapid hurrying off to the rear of the cavalry, until they came to have the fixed idea, that the sight of the enemy _always_ made a cavalryman "hungry for solitude." They reasoned that, as a mounted man was much better _fixed_ for running away than a footman, it was, by so much, natural that he _should_ run away, and was, by so much, the more likely to do it.