The volunteers could not even be shod. Those who were accepted had to drill in their worthless street shoes, that never could survive the test of rough roads and mud and water.
Politics! Politics! It stared the appalled citizens in the face wherever they turned, as it had stared them in the face for a generation—but now they had to look and see! It was politics that had left their State militias to blunder along, each by itself, without agreement or settled plan. It was politics that now had sent their plucky, intelligent, capable young men into the field insufficiently equipped, trained or organized. It was politics that now left their cities bare, to be made a sport of.
At the recruiting depots of the regular army it was politics again that over-bore the recruiting officers with eager, courageous applicants whom they could not use. What they needed now was men who were ready NOW—not men who needed six months’ training. These applicants, offering themselves by thousands, were city-born and city-bred. They were men who never in all their lives had slept except under a roof; who never had lain in rain and storm; who had been saved by their city from doing a dozen simple things that men of the open do for themselves without a second thought.
Not one in a thousand of these volunteers ever had built a fire of sticks, or pitched a tent or even washed dishes. Not one of five thousand ever had held a gun in his hands. There were thousands there, and thousands again, who did not even know what it was to be in the dark—for they had slept all their lives in the electrically lighted city.
Needed—Not Men But Reserves!
It was not men that the regular army needed. It was reserves! And never a Congress of all the Congresses that had talked and voted and appropriated had voted a practical system of army reserves![45]
Of all the men who had been trained by previous army experience, the War Department could not call on one unless he chose to volunteer. If those men—invaluable to the country at this moment—offered themselves, they offered themselves one by one, here and there and everywhere, scattered through a land of three and a quarter million square miles. Enlisted thus, they were futile individuals lost in hordes
