film broke and did not record the fact that Captain Ward put Bob and
John on a commissary wagon that stood in a side street as the soldiers
moved out. John remembered looking into a street filled with marching
soldiers. First the regulars and the artillery came swinging down the
street. At their head the boy saw General Lyon, the commanding
officer, and around him was a bodyguard whose plumed hats, with the
left brim pinned up, caught the boys' eyes. The regulars marched by
silently. It was part of their day's work; but following them came a
detachment of Germans singing "Marchen Rote," and then the battery of
six guns and then the Kansans. Small wonder Captain Gordon Granger
told Colonel Mitchel that the Kansas soldiers were only an armed mob.
They filed out of Springfield, some in rags and some in tags and some
in velvet gowns. They carried guns; but they looked like delegates to
a convention, and as the boys saw their own company, they waved their
hands, but they were almost ashamed of the shabby clothes of the men
from Sycamore Ridge; for a boy always notices clothes on others. When
the Germans stopped singing "Marchen Rote," the boys heard Watts
McHurdie's high tenor voice start up "The Dutch Companee," and the
crowd that was lining the street cheered and cheered. A Missouri
regiment followed and more regulars, and then a battery of four guns
passed, and then came more Kansans still going to that everlasting
convention. And a band came roaring by,--with its crashing brass and
rumbling drums,--and then after the band had turned the corner, came
Iowa in gray blouses and such other garments as the clothes-lines of
the country afforded. They were singing as they passed--a song the
boy had never heard, being all about the "happy land of Canaan." And
before the sun had set again, after that night, hundreds of those who
sang of the happy land were there. In the rear were the ambulances and
the ammunition and the hospital vans, and the wagon which held the
boys wheeled into the line. After they had passed, the streets were