OUR NATION’S NEW HEROES
The great General Grant, when a cadet, went through his course at West Point with one foot out of the Academy and the other in. So curiously deficient was he in all the arts and sciences which theory insists must go to make the perfect soldier that he was always in the “Immortals.”
“Immortals” is the name of the section at the foot of the class, admission to whose profane cult means small marks and the possible privilege of resigning at the end of the half-year. Immortals is a neat contraction of “Les Immortals,”—that is, lazy mortals. Immortal Grant became, but not in the way the academic reports of the time would have indicated.
This has proved true again and again among the graduates of the Naval Academy, as well as those of West Point. Though the “child is father to the man” in general tendencies and character, it does not follow that mere mental attainments are an indication of great genius in the practical operation of the great military professions. Works of the brain and works of the body and spirit are two things; and though the finely-ordered mind controls to a degree both body and spirit, no such mechanism can ever accomplish great deeds in which heart and spirit are needed, though it may plan the details with a nicety to challenge criticism. A combination of all these qualities is rare, for the bookworm is seldom an enthusiast on any subject which gets very far away from his theories.
DOES SCHOLARSHIP COUNT IN WAR?
The Spanish war has shown that it is not always the men who stand at the heads of their classes who lead in the more practical duties of ship and camp. Admiral Sampson, one of the greatest thinkers and most profound students in the navy, as a boy and as a man always led in everything he undertook; but, on the other hand, Hobson, though one of the leaders of his class at Annapolis, was demure and retiring, hardly the man one would select to lead a forlorn hope into the jaws of death.
One may go through the list man for man, and find as many backward in their studies as those who have carved high niches for themselves in the Academy records.
No proposition could cover the situation in a general way, for, after all, the men we have heard from were perhaps only lucky,—lucky in being chosen as the instruments of the result. There are hundreds—thousands—of officers in the service, some brilliant, some wise, some brave, some strong, as good as they, who have lacked only opportunity. The singling out of any names for special mention seems an injustice to them,—“the heroes of the heart.”