Regiments of Infantry Without a Single Cannon to Protect Them
To organize an army in the face of the foe is like organizing a fire department when the streets of a city are already in flames. This is what the Chiefs of the Army were trying to do—had been doing, day and night, desperately, ever since the troops had come together. And in Washington, in the archives of Congress, there were lying sheaves of reports, gathering dust, that had demanded nothing except the chance to do it in time.
Here were regiments of militia so “organized” by their States that if they were permitted to go into battle as they were, 170 companies of infantry would face the enemy without a single cannon to protect them. Of all the eastern militia cavalry in that camp, only one regiment had a machine gun company.[53]
Even the regular army was efficient only in those things that could be maintained and perfected by the steady, personal efforts of officers and men. In everything that depended on legislation it was lacking. Instead of 150 men to a company of infantry some had only 65. Its troops of cavalry were not full. It had no siege artillery corps. It was a skeleton army which, according to optimists, was to be clothed with substance when war arrived. Now war had come; and to clothe that skeleton with untrained men would have meant that for every 65 skilled soldiers there would be 85 utterly useless ones in each company.
Shortage of men was not the only curse that was laid on the army by the policy of neglect. In the enemy headquarters, two or at the most three orders were sent to department chiefs for every movement. In the American headquarters, the staff had to deal with units. Every problem had to be handled in detail by men who should have been free to direct one great, comprehensive movement. Every order issued by the Commanding General demanded intolerable duplication.
American Commanders Who Had Never Commanded
The General had under him commanders of brigade who had commanded posts that contained only fragments of regiments. Their brigades, never assembled in any one place, not only did not approximate to war conditions, but had to be disrupted and divided and re-formed before the General could dare to offer them in battle. Hardly a brigade commander had under him troops that he had known and trained and handled himself.[54]
With exception of those who had been on the Mexican border, when a part of the small army had been mobilized in a body for the first time, these men had tried to prepare themselves with the best that Congress would give them—battalions and companies and single batteries instead of assembled armies, because the politicians would not let the army come together.
The 49 army posts of the United States, long a subject of derision among all except those who fattened on them, might well have been symbolized now in that camp by forty-nine skeletons—a skeleton army waiting to lead the other skeleton army to death.[55]
To none was this better known than to the enemy. The invaders’ commander, standing idly with his hands in his pockets, was able to say confidently: “They’ll not bother us seriously. The only thing they’ll do, the only thing they can do, is to retreat when we begin to threaten them.”