“Well, maybe you think I’m not glad of my share in remaking a man like that. It paid me for all my work and worry in the League. I believe that our Division would have made good if it had not done anything more than just what it did for Joe.”
One does not know of any better summary of the slacker raids than that conveyed by this simple little story from one chief out of very many hundreds.
CHAPTER XII
SKULKER CHASING
Hunting Bad Men—Deserter-Catching in the Southern Mountains—Tricks of the Slacker’s Trade—Running Down Unwilling Patriots—Some A. P. L. Adventures—Death of a Deserter—How a Southern Ranger Brings Them In.
One of the earliest recollections of the writer’s boyhood is that of seeing his father busily engaged in molding bullets for his rifle on a certain Sunday morning—at that time the old muzzle-loading rifle was still in use. The old gentleman was with the Army Recruiting Service in the Civil War, in a branch which at times was obliged to look after men who were evading the draft or unduly prolonging their furloughs, or who belonged to that detested group of conscientious objectors and obstructionists who at that time bore the local name of “Copperheads.” Some of these men had ambushed and killed two of the Army men sent out to bring them in, and as others of the force then took up the matter, it was deemed wise to be alert and well armed. The murderers were duly apprehended and dealt with.
At that time we had a United States Secret Service whose annals make interesting reading to-day—as, for instance, the burial by Secret Service men of the body of John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of President Lincoln. That final resting place to this day is known to very few men. There was, however, in Civil War times no Military Intelligence Division, no censorship of the mails or cables, no real system of espionage, and certainly no A. P. L. We had less need then than now for such extensions of the arm of Justice, because then each army was fighting an honorable foe—though both were mistaken foes—and because our country then was not populated so largely with unassimilated and treacherous foreigners. There was some spy work in that time on both sides, as in any war; but for the most part, clean, straightaway fighting was the main concern of both sides; and that war was so fought that such a thing as honor did exist and could survive for both combatants.
The Civil War had as one of its worst results the fact that the rich new West and Northwest, then opening up with the early railroads, came to be largely settled soon after the war by a heavy foreign population, instead of by young Americans who must otherwise have marched out at the head of the rails, and not at the head of armies from which so many of them never returned. Had there been no Civil War, there would have been less of loose immigration. Without that war, there would be no Non-Partisan League in the Northwest, no German Alliance in the Middle West, no Bolshevism in the cities of the East. Nevertheless, even in that day of honorable warfare, when men met foemen worthy of their steel and not cowardly assassins, there existed men who had the craven heart. There were deserters then as there always are in war,—and sometimes they were sought out by men who molded bullets of a Sunday morning, and who, having started out after their men, did not come back until they had found them.
To-day also we have deserters and slackers—let us say, perhaps, with better color of excuse than in the old days, because in some of the more remote districts of the United States, far from the confusion of the crowded city life, in sections where the world runs smoothly and quietly and men are content, there existed no definite and concrete local reasons for a man to go to war with a foe across the sea of whom he knew little or nothing. Secure in the only American part of America, sometimes the Southern mountaineers, for instance, resented the draft because they did not understand it. The bravest of the brave, ready to fight at the drop of the hat, and natural soldiers, there were among them many whose fathers joined the Federal Army in the Civil War. They volunteered for that—but they would not be drafted for this foreign war. They made a brand of conscientious objectors—rather, say, ignorant objectors—who were dangerous to go up against in the laurel thickets or the far-back mountain coves. Very often, these men, when they learned how the flag of this country had been insulted, how our women and children had been murdered on the sea, were eager to join the colors, and never again were they deserters or slackers—only fighting men.
To this form of military evader among the simple outlying people of the southern hills, there must be added a great many deserters of foreign descent all over the country, caught in the Selective Service Act. Some of these had imbibed no real loyalty to America in their home associations; much too often their environments were those of other countries and not this. They heard another speech than ours used as a “mother tongue”; daily saw customs of the old world maintained, and not those of the new world taken on. They had small heart for the war because their loyalty to this country still was crude and unformulated. Many of the foreign-born troops who fought so well in France first joined our colors, not because they wished to, but because they had to, the law leaving no option. After that, they learned the fierce love of a real soldier for the real flag of a real country. Perhaps their wounds and their deaths may teach their surviving relatives in America not to remain foreigners, but to become Americans—and not foreigners masquerading as Americans. Some of our best soldiers had fathers who had taken the German oath never to renounce fealty to that famous “War Lord,” chiefest coward of them all, who had not courage to die at the head of his army.
There was also in this war, as in all other wars, a certain percentage of the sullen and rebellious, of the weak and cowardly, men of no mark and no convictions in any cause, men who never rise above themselves and their selfish concerns in any situation. Beyond these, again, was a small class whose natural home longings or home bewailings or home pleadings led them to desert. Because of many reasons, then, a certain percentage of deserters marked this war as every war.