1880

As the army fought and bore the brunt on the one hand, so it prepared itself in its technic. A new Cavalry Drill Regulations was published at this time. It seemed to adapt the movements of the mounted service more thoroughly to the work on the plains. Provision was made very carefully for handling each contingency of march or action. Besides a dismounted drill in 2 ranks made the use of the Cavalry more extended. The captain's command was still called a company, the major's a battalion, and the lieutenant's a platoon.

Thus the army in this period after the Civil War plodded along, too dispersed most of the time to collect in even respectable detachments. It marched through parching heat and arctic cold only to find precarious battle or distasteful execution of bureaucratic injustice at the end. Through blood and hardship it tried to square the government for its criminal blunders. Hungry, thirsty, exhausted and wounded the soldier too often fought in actions which he did not believe justified. But his loyalty made him answer the command of his nation and he went forward.

And he carried on in the face of the deepest ingratitude of his people. His pay was cut, his comrades summarily discharged, his supplies and arms made inferior to those of his enemy and any hope of promotion blotted out. Surrounded by thousands of savages in a vast prairie, he could count at most a few hundred with him to help hold them in check. Why he went on, why he went through the agonies of hell for a nation that kicked him at every turn, is almost beyond human analysis.

And yet the awful marches and these heroic fights were the soldier's main dependence. He got away from the most provincial garrison life into which any government ever forced an army. Living in flimsy shacks, without the commonest conveniences found in the east, he froze in winter and stifled in summer. Tenderly reared women heroically went through these hardships with their husbands. Breakfast was often eaten when the water in the tumblers had a crust of ice upon them. Dinner at other times was served when swarms of insects would rob the appetite. Winter or summer, in or out of the fort, there was no escape from the rough life of the frontier. But through

these grim days there was time to find compassion and succor for the suffering squaw or the white family driven in from their settlements. The post was the haven of all classes, and in this comfort many a soldier's wife found an outlet from the dread monotony.

With stables in the morning early, with breakfast next, then parade, then drill and stables in the afternoon, the work of the day, except the endless fatigue, was over. There could be no more than rudimentary exercises for from 38 to 50 men. There could be no training. When lieutenants and captains expected to hold their same grade for 20 or 30 years and were not afterwards disappointed in this, and when these very officers had been generals over large commands in the Civil War, a great wave of ambition and spirit could hardly grip their energies. With few books, an occasional mail, no golf courses, no tennis courts, no activities to arouse the interest even of a spectator, the soldier was really closed to the recreation of the bottle and cards. The sutler's store was the only club and its rough boards and hot stove a place of rare comfort. But with all this desultory life, there was little trouble over gambling and a surprisingly small amount of drunkenness. In this age of fulsome entertainment, one cannot visualize the barrenness that then enclosed the soldier's life.

When the commanding officer had too great a proportion of illiterates and desperadoes in his organization, when savagery, rudeness and the outbreaks of the lawless loomed on every hand, he had to have a hard discipline that looks severe in the New York Library. He had at times to resort to the ball and chain, to close confinement and the harshest restrictions of his officers

and men. He had to have the most rigid formality at the mess table, to inculcate an unwavering respect for rank and to notice the smallest details of official and social customs. He had to be a czar or he could not have lived peaceably in his military oasis on a threatening desert. He had to watch the little things of his small province or soon they would be big things. The very life blood of his command depended upon his supervision of what appear to us now to be the pettiest of details. He had to be "hard boiled" or he, his handful of soldiers and the surrounding country could not have survived.

The nation forced him into this position, as it forced the demise of Thornburg, Canby and even Custer's command and the death of many another soldier, when it made beggarly detachments fight an overwhelming quantity of wily savages on their own soil. The government as usual scrupled on money for an army, but it did not seem to be anxious about the loss of life that resulted from parsimony. And so the army was thrown into dark ages of hopelessness. Though he grumbled, the soldier did more than his duty, sustained by an unfaltering honor that faced death for an ideal.

N

CHAPTER X

THE ARMY'S RENAISSANCE

FIRST PHASE

(1881-1898)

OTWITHSTANDING the cudgelings of stress, neglect

and hostility that beset the soldier, the army began to be restless for something better. The stir of honest ambition, that lies close to true American hearts, plainly started 1881 to transform itself into concrete movement. If the powers

denied to the service a chance of handling the larger units in maneuver, then the military man would do the next best thing and move imaginary forces on paper and would read of the best technic and tactics from books. If the government prevented practice, at least the officer could voluntarily absorb more theory. He could thus have some advancement in the knowledge of the most intricate and extensive profession found in civilization.

1

1881

When the general of the army 1 laid the foundation of the School of Application for Infantry and Cavalry at Fort Leaven- May 7 worth, Kansas, he sowed the seed of advanced learning in the service. Although the course of instruction then prescribed for this institution was primitive and elementary, the very installation was the beginning of general and special service schools that were to spring up later and make our officers the peers in the art and science of war of any in the world. Thus the army began to wake itself, unaided, from the dark ages of provincial life into which the nation had thrown it.

1 General Sherman.

1881

The nucleus of progressives who built up a first- and a second-year course at Leavenworth little knew that the efforts of this institution were to be one of the great factors in the successes of two modern wars. Neither did they realize that their onward-looking efforts would step by step cause an officer to have a continuous education throughout his career. At first officers were detailed from their regiments to be students and those who were in command of troops at the school were in general to be instructors. The first year was taken up with the rudiments of a general education and the second with certain books on the science and art of war. Papers by both students and instructors were to be read at various times.

2

The beginning of any renaissance is too dim, as we know, to throw a full light upon conditions at once. The army went along in this year without much to alleviate the load of its irksome and humdrum duties. In fact, Congress let it rest dormant for the next seventeen years without doing a single vital thing toward its strength or monetary needs. But within the service there was a decided ripple of constructive unrest which tended toward practical and theoretical efficiency in spite of the unsympathetic aloofness of the government.

2 FIRST CLASS:

Mahan's Outposts.

Myer's Signaling.

Mahan's (Wheeler's) Field Fortifications.

Woolsey's International Law and Laws of War.
Ive's Military Law.

Operations of War (Hamley).

The Lessons of War as Taught by the Great Masters (Colonel
France J. Soady).

Lectures by professors and essays prepared by students from general
reading.

Practical instruction in surveying and reconnoitering by itineraries and field notes, as prescribed for the use of the army.

FOR THE SECOND CLASS:

Correct reading aloud, with care and precision, with proper accent and pauses, to be heard and understood.

Writing, a plain hand easy to read, designed for the use of the party receiving, and not an exhibition of haste and negligence of the writer, especially the signature.

Grammar (Bingham).

Arithmetic (Hagar).

Geometry (Chauvenet).

Trigonometry (Chauvenet).

General Sketch of History (Freeman).

History of the United States (Seavey, Goodrich).