"Captain Mitchell was quoted as having said that 'it would take the United States about three years to put an army of one million trained men in the field, and in that time an enemy could take and hold our American seaboards.'
"Secretary Garrison said he considered such utterances, if made in public at present, injudicious and improper."
When a hunter goes out with a gun after game, he does not consider it good sport to shoot a four-footed beast or flying fowl without first giving the victim a chance for its life, and an opportunity to give the alarm to its fellows; yet our army and navy men, under the present gag rule, are not given a sportsman's chance to escape being shot, through our national unpreparedness, or even to give a cry of warning to their fellows. Even the murderer is given a chance to present his case before being executed, but the American soldier is not afforded any such opportunity.
Our Congress allows itself to be dominated by impossible pacific ideas, and consequently neglects to take the necessary sane precautions to safeguard the country against war, or even to avert disaster in case of war, and yet, when there arises a casus belli, Congress feels no moral compunction against declaring war and sending its ill-equipped, thin-ranked, ill-provided Army to the front to face inescapable death.
If the troops run out of ammunition on the firing-line, they cannot retire, but must keep their line unbroken, even though they are all killed.
At the battle of Spottsylvania Court House, in the Civil War, the regiment in which my brother Leander served was caught in exactly this position. They had been drawn up to defend a baggage train. They held their places, and loaded and fired until their ammunition was exhausted; and still they held their places under a rain of bullets from the enemy, until reënforcements came. Of that company, which went into the fight a hundred strong, eighty-four were killed, among them my brother.
In war, the lives of a few hundred, or even a few thousand soldiers, count for nothing, if the position they are holding has a greater strategic value than their lives. When food runs short, it sometimes becomes strategically a good bargain to sacrifice the lives of a thousand men in a forage raid to bring in a thousand sheep. In such a case, a sheep is worth more than a man, because the sheep can be eaten, and the man cannot.
There are some things in this world that we are able to know are absolutely wrong. Of these, nothing is surer than that it is wrong to forbid our army and navy officers the public expression of their opinions, which would give the country the benefit of their knowledge and experience. Not only this, but it is a great injustice to the officers of the Army and the Navy, for, if war comes, it is they who will have to stand on the firing-line—not the individuals of civilian officialdom.
When, in the near future, our fleet is sent to intercept the on-coming superior fleet of an enemy, those officers who must stand on the bridge and at their posts on the decks—and go down with their ships—are the very men now gagged by civilian red tape.