Part 25

Occasionally a West Pointer may have had some of his illusions about "they" amended by his colonel; but anything like a full revelation was out of the question. The young lieutenant, when he went to an army post at home or in the Philippines, found himself in the same isolated world of army thought and associations. The troops he commanded hardly put him in touch with the average of citizens. They were men who, in a country which did not feel the call to military service, enlisted for $17.50 a month and the security of army life, oftener than for adventure or ambition. Between them and their officers there was as broad a gulf as between any officer class in Europe and their soldiers. All standards were set on the time required to drill these recruits and form them in the regular army mould.

When officers met, ten or twenty years after graduation or receiving their commissions, they found none of the changes of fortune which alumni of civil colleges found. Everyone was in the same relative rank as when he became a second lieutenant. The army opposed promotion by selection, as that meant "political" influence and favoritism. Promotion by selection was against the law, except that the President might, if he chose, make a second lieutenant a brigadier or major-general with the consent of the Senate. The promotion of Wood, Bell, Funston, and Pershing to be brigadiers over the heads of many seniors led to no end of ill-feeling in the army, which made these ambitious and able officers the victims of an unpopularity which only time and the retirement of older officers could overcome.

They had all distinguished themselves in the Spanish War, which had awakened us to a realization that though we had excellent regiments, which exhibited all the sturdy and dependable qualities of the regulars, we had no army organization. Under Secretary Root we developed the staff school and the school of the line at Leavenworth, and the War College at Washington, as a series of schools where ambitious officers could study tactics, specialize in different branches, form paper armies, and direct them in the field. The Staff College applied West Point industry. Its students worked long hours in the enthusiasm of mastering their profession. It was necessarily scholastic. I remember seeing, soon after the Russo-Japanese War, a combat maneuver of a few companies in the fields at Leavenworth. It was carried out in a manner that would have mortified a young reserve officer in France. Some of the soldiers participating had had two and three years' service. In wonted freedom of speech I suggested that with three months' training companies of college men, farm-hands, elevator boys, brakemen, firemen, clerks, and managers, drawn from civil life, could be taught to perform this maneuver better than we had just seen it performed. There was a chorus of protest, particularly from the older officers, who were saying that the trouble was that these men had not had enough drill: it took five years to make a soldier. Not all the younger officers joined in this view. One had the courage to express his opinion: "You're right--provided those citizens you mention put their hearts and intelligence into the job. Give them six months, with enough experts to train them, and plenty of war material to back them; shoot over them a few times--and I'd ask nothing better than to lead them." He was to live to see his heresy become orthodoxy; to see West Point receiving lessons in democracy from American soldiery.

Upon our entry into the war, our officers might have been divided into three classes: (A), including about ten per cent of the whole, officers who were the best of the Leavenworth graduates: officers who had shown administrative ability and natural leadership; officers who were in touch with the world, alert, vital, with strong constitutions, and the capacity of meeting situations. These men would have done well in any occupation in civil life. (B), average officers, devoted to their duty, consistently efficient. These represented about forty per cent. They would have been moderately successful in civil life. (C), the remaining fifty per cent, of varying degrees of capacity. They included the officers who kept step and escaped courts, those without ambition, those who had not grown since they received their commissions, the fussy sticklers for etiquette without power of initiative, those who avoided any extra work, those who were never meant to lead men in battle. This class, with few exceptions, would not have been successful in civil life; not good lawyers or doctors, railroad men or mechanics. They would never have earned the pay they received anywhere but in the army.

Taken as a whole, the average was about the same as in any group of men; it was high, indeed, considering the absence of incentive and of competition. Then there were the unknown quantities in every class: the officers whose latent powers, hitherto undetected, came into play under the call of emergency; and the officers who disappointed expectations formed in peace when they were put to the test of war.

All of them were fellows in the life of the post, where the feminine element had its influence. Almost without exception they lived modestly on their pay. Everyone knew the other's income. The rank of wives was that of their husbands. The officer commanding was the head of the family. All the jealousies of any isolated community were in play. There was bound to be intrigue for good assignments, not only in Washington and favorite posts at home, but in the Philippines; but there was no such thing as corruption. The army was straight; its code of honor was unimpeachable, except in the influences for good assignments. There were hops and dinners, and visiting back and forth. Inner feelings might be strong, but they must be kept under the mantle of formal politeness; for you did not choose your companions. They were chosen by army orders. Everything was official, and what was not was rank.

Talk at the bachelor messes and at all gatherings was about "shop": which left the outsider as detached as a railroad man attending a convention of chemists. The lack of common themes was one reason for absence of contact with the "they" of the outside world. The army register was the most read of books. It showed where all your friends were serving, and also you could reckon when you would receive your promotion, and when perhaps you might have a separate command, with husband and wife outranking all present and having to follow the views of no senior in matters of routine. Strong and biting criticisms were exchanged of fellow officers, whose nicknames of cadet days remained,--whether "Rusty," or "Poppy," "Wooden-headed Charlie," "Slow Bill," "Pincushion Pete," or "Noisy Tom." Smith had gone to seed. How Jones had ever been able to graduate from the Point was past understanding. Robinson managed more good appointments with less ability than any man in the service. All belonged to the army; in the presence of the outside world there could be no fault in the army. Officers stood together; they stood up for their men, no matter how mercilessly they "bawled them out" at drill. In the background at drill and in the barracks were the sergeants and corporals, the "non-coms," who shaped the "rookies" into soldiers, and who carried on all the routine drills. Old soldiers, they had fallen into the habit of army life. Their position in our democratic country lacked the importance that it enjoyed in European armies. In the offices were the field clerks, who ran the typewriters and carried on office routine.

Among the officers the college spirit backing the football team for victory, and that of the secret society and of the trade-union, were inevitably, as in all officers' corps, united in the common fealty of self-protection. The army was always fighting for its rights against an unappreciative nation. Secretly it was always against each administration. Roosevelt was almost hated at one time. Later he was admired. Congress was regarded as a natural enemy which cut down appropriations. Civilian secretaries of war, who came into office without the slightest knowledge of the character of the military service, fell into the hands of a clique of officers close to the throne. Unless you had a friend among them, you might not count on good assignments, said the pessimistic of class C.

The feeling that the army was underpaid was as common as that it was unappreciated. Officers, thinking only of the men in civil life who succeeded, complained that they could not associate with the outside world because they had not the money to keep up their social end. The dream of every officer was of a great conscript army, like the French or German. This meant promotion, of course, and that the army would count for something in the country, though the thought was not consciously selfish on the part of the best men. It was professional and natural human ambition, based on the conviction of the necessity of military training for every citizen. Without it an officer could not be a good soldier. It was a better spirit than that of the time-servers of class C, who were interested in promotion alone, and in passing the time.

The prospect of Japan taking the Pacific Coast was the main item of propaganda before the Great War began. Then Germany, or the victor in the war, was seen devastating our coasts, his great guns toppling our cities in ruins, and his infantry sweeping across country, perpetrating the horrors of Belgium. Any officer who knew his profession in the large, knew--despite the figures assembled for its proof--that the transport of forces for a successful invasion was out of the question; but such methods of making the flesh creep alone could awaken an indifferent public to the necessity of an adequate army and the value of military drill to our heterogeneous population. The regulars saw us depending against trained hosts upon citizens in shirt-sleeves and the undisciplined National Guard. "They" of the outside world were concerned only with their own prosperity--undisciplined, utterly without the military sense or spirit. War was a biological necessity. There had always been war, and there always would be war. One day we would find ourselves at war. The nation would call for soldiers, and the little band of regulars would go forth to sacrifice. Meanwhile, in the midst of ignorance, they would keep the altar fires burning, and remain true to the traditions of their profession.

Then a miracle happened. The dream of the regulars came true. There were to be no political generals: none were to be rewarded with commissions for raising regiments, as in the Civil War. We were to have the draft; all direction was to be left to the professional. The nation signed a check upon all our resources, human and material, to be filled out by them. Our people offered all they had in order to save civilization. Their thought was the interest of their souls, their country, humanity, and their future happiness and prosperity.

To the army officers war was their occupation: a viewpoint entirely different. Glorious opportunity had burst the door of their isolation wide open, beckoning them to power. It was the same to them as if overnight the stocks in a land company had jumped a thousand per cent owing to the discovery of oil on its property. Majors and captains of classes B and C were to be colonels of regiments of three thousand men, more than colonels, and many brigadiers, had ever commanded. All the officers of class A might now carry out their theories in practice: they might aim for the command, not of paper, but of real armies in battle. Only a few had been in touch with the psychology of the country. The country was swarming in upon them. Was it surprising that some of class C and class B and even of class A felt, at the prospect of enlightening the ignorance of the manhood of all the United States, a constriction of cap-bands which had formerly been large enough?

For recruit officers of this enormous new army we turned to our colleges and technical schools. This was an educational test, but the only one that could be hurriedly applied. The average of the candidates for the officers' training camps must be as naturally capable as the average of army officers. They must possess a class A, drawn from men already tested in civil life, which would be equal in brain power to class A on the army list; and it must be relatively larger, considering how few army officers there were and how numerous were the educated, intelligent, and ambitious youth of our country. Among those who were only privates in the swarms of volunteers who enlisted immediately upon our entry into the war were privates to whom nature had given a natural capacity for leadership which no curriculum of a military school or civil college could supply; who were to take the leadership of companies out of the hands of men who had an "A plus" in calculus, surveying, and Latin. After the volunteers, the draft men began arriving at the training camps in excursion parties.

"When I saw them piling off the train," said one regular officer, "the undisciplined sons of an undisciplined people, I wondered what they would do to us. They had not been in camp a day before I knew that they were going to play the game." It had never occurred to him, his horizon restricted from his juvenile days at the Academy, that there was discipline in the running of our railroads, our industries, our labor unions, our societies, our lodges, and in all the team-play of our sports; that we were all used to obeying orders in the process of earning a living or winning a baseball game. Those boys among the volunteers and in the draft were of the same kind as the boys who went to the Point to become members of the officer class. There had been no such military marvel in all history as the willingness of our people to yield authority which the British had granted only after painful stages of inveterate resistance. It was all inexpressibly magnificent; a better proof of strength and character than any form of routine military preparedness. Given such a spirit--a spirit the stronger for the dislike of military forms and the aversion to war--and we could no more fail of victory in the end than you can exterminate the Jewish race. Without that spirit nations decay and fail, for war does not form character: war only expresses the character formed in peace.

Every volunteer and draft private, every would-be officer, realized his ignorance, as a neophyte about to be initiated into professional mystery. He had the willingness to conform, the eagerness to learn, of the neophyte. No teachers were ever safer from scepticism on the part of their pupils. The West Point discipline was applied. It taught the drillmaster's fundamentals of forming good physique and habits of strict routine. For this, great credit is due. This host of recruits, American in intelligence and adaptability, "playing the game," never able to answer back, rigid at salute, imbibing the instruction of class A or enduring the outbursts of temper in good army "bawling out" language from class C, formed a silent body of criticism which became increasingly discriminate with growth of knowledge. The instructors did not forget that the course at West Point was four years, though they did forget that three-fourths of the curriculum consisted of elementals learned at a civil school. They did forget their association with the "rookies" who became privates of regulars in time of peace. Holding fast to these criteria, they overlooked how fast the average youth of America could learn when he put his heart and mind into intensive study and drill.

XXV

LEAVENWORTH COMMANDS

Developing "staff work" in France--The younger men from Leavenworth schools in the saddle--The inner ring of the expert--Building the "best staff" at Langres--The obsession of promotion.

So it happened that the little band of regulars did not go out to sacrifice in a body. They were scattered through the training camps as instructors, and they directed the expansion of our army organization. The officers of our General Staff in Washington had followed the strategy of the war on the maps, and studied its larger tactical problems in the light of such reports as were received. Their own precepts and training led them to admire the German rather than the French army system; a majority, thinking at first that Germany would win, were accordingly impressed with the seriousness of our undertaking when we entered the war. They hardly realized that the Canadians and Australians, who were people of something the same character as ourselves, had developed from raw recruits divisions and corps which were without superiors. We had formed no plan for operating an army in Europe. We seemed to be unfamiliar with the static details of trench warfare, with the clothing and equipment required; otherwise all this information would not have had to be sent back by the officers of our pioneer force in France three months after our entry into the war.

The training camps being established, and munition plants under way at home, we must prepare to command our forces when they were ready to take the field. "Staff work" was supposed the most expert of all the branches. In my first book I have already gone into the organization of our staff in France, formed on the plan of European staffs. What I have to add now comes in the light of later events, after the staff had been tried in battle, and in the light of the days of peace, when discrimination will not be misunderstood. In the early days in France a progressive officer said to me: "We must not go too fast in elimination of the unfit and promotion of the fit. It will upset the equilibrium. We must wait on evolution." It was General Pershing who had to maintain the equilibrium. He was a regular; and regulars regarded him as their general. He had to depend upon the men who had rank; and upon trained soldiers who knew the army system, in order to start his machine. One day, someone remarked to him, "But this officer is in a rut, and a winding rut, that does not permit him to see ahead, let alone over the walls." The General replied: "But he's one of my broad-minded ones. What do you think I do with my narrow-minded ones?"

Possibly the tests, ever so swift in war, were swifter in France than at home. It was soon evident that some regular officers could rise to their tasks, and that some could not. Some of them had fallen into habits that did not permit long concentration of mind. They had not the physical vitality to endure long hours of labor. They were obsessed by small details, when they were suddenly given charge of a department store instead of a little store with one clerk for an assistant. Some were simply overwhelmed by their new burdens, or more possessed with the pride of authority than its efficient exertion. They were the ones who would show reserve officers that building a bridge or baking a loaf of bread or putting up a crane or organizing a laboratory was a different matter when you did it for the army. Some who had vitality and concentration were hopelessly lacking in capacity for organization. They were particularly impressed with their awful responsibility in having to train reserve officers not only in combat but in the Services of Supply. They would not admit that there was anything about the army which a reserve officer could do as well as a regular. The capacity of many for prolonged controversy over theory and for writing memoranda was astounding; a result of the days of talking "shop" and speculative discussion at the posts. Where naval officers have always a fleet in being, and are always on a war footing--which means a successful secretary of the navy if he will only sign the papers placed on his desk--army officers had only an army in imagination, which meant that a "successful" secretary of war must indeed be a great man.

From the first there was a struggle in France between two elements: between the ruthlessly progressive and the reactionaries who were set in traditions; between the able, energetic, ambitious, enduring, and others who might have finer but not as aggressive qualities; between the men who were sure of themselves and those who were not. For his immediate advisers Pershing had to turn to the Leavenworth men, who had been trained in the theory of a large organization and who had used it as the basis of intelligent observation of the operations of the French and British armies. A Leavenworth man believed in Leavenworth men. He had enormous capacity for desk work which he had developed as a student at Leavenworth. A scholastic preparation thus became the criterion for practice in organization. Leavenworth men believed in the gospel of driving hard work; of rewards for success, and merciless elimination for failure--which is the basic theory of successful war.

All armies are looking either back at the last war or ahead to the next. One element, leaning back on its oars, considers the lessons of the last war, if it were won, as setting all precedents for present policy. Another, usually the men who were not in the last war except as captains and lieutenants, considers that new conditions will again set new precedents in the next war. The officers in the forties in the days of the war with Spain and the Philippine rebellion, who chafed at the Civil War traditions of their seniors, now had command of divisions, while in the Great War the Leavenworth men who were in the thirties and forties were pushing up from below. If the later generation lacked rank on this occasion, it had power in France as the result of Leavenworth and the new staff system, while promotion by selection called its ambition.

Leavenworth graduates sat in the seats of the mighty on the right and left hand of the Commander-in-Chief; the tables of organization were of their devising; the orders signed by the Chief of Staff, which the divisional and the corps generals and all the generals of the Services of Supply had to obey, originated from this inner circle in the barracks buildings at Chaumont, which was surrounded with professional mystery. Divisional and corps chiefs of staff were Leavenworth men in touch with the inner circle. The disrespectful thought of these officers as the Leavenworth "clique"; but it was not the fashion to do much thinking aloud about them, such was their power. They did not think of themselves as a clique; not even the members of a secret society think of themselves in that way. They were a group of veterans, who if they had not the scars won in battle--we had had no great battles since the Civil War--had burned the midnight oil and played the war game together. They had, as volunteers, in order to learn their profession, when the people of the country knew no more of their existence than if they had been in a monastery, gone through a post-graduate course as rigorous as West Point itself. They thought of themselves as apostles, their voices unheard in a land saturated with pacifism and indifference, who, in fasting, prayer, and industry, had studied the true gospel in their holy of holies. They alone had conned the pages of the sacred books behind the altar where the regular army kept the sacred fires burning.

"War is the greatest game on earth," as one of them said. In this thought they had the same reason for enthusiasm in study as a chemist in his experiments or an architect in his building. In their school in the wheat fields of Kansas they were manipulating in theory forces which made a hundred million dollar corporation an incidental pawn. But they were dealing with the imaginary, and the managers of the corporation with the real. When the war came all their forces of imagination became real.