“They furnish a protected harbor within which our own navy could take refuge if defeated or scattered,” said the Admiral. “They make our protected cities absolutely secure against a purely naval attack. No navy could readily pass the defenses, and probably none would venture so close as even to bombard them seriously. Certainly no fleet could bombard the cities behind them.
“Therefore,” he continued, “if an enemy wishes to bring war to us, he must land an army of invasion. Our harbor defenses force him to do that; but—having forced him to bring the army, their function ceases. They cannot prevent him from landing it. We have to do that with OUR army.”
“And could you stop him, or is that a military secret?” asked one of the party. He did it tentatively. He had been a war correspondent with foreign armies, and he did not expect a reply.
31,000 Men—Our Actual Mobile Army
“My dear boy,” answered the Chief of Staff promptly, “there probably isn’t a General Staff in the world that doesn’t know all about us, to the last shoe on the last army mule. We’ve got 88,000 men in the regular army, officers and privates.[4] Of these, you may count out 19,000. They are non-combatants—cooks, hospital staffs, teamsters, armorers, blacksmiths, and all the other odds and ends that an army must have, but can’t use for fighting. Now, cut out another 21,000 men. Those are fighting men, but they’re not here. They’re in Panama, Hawaii, the Philippines, China and Alaska—and we wish that we had about three times as many there, especially in Panama. How much does that leave? Forty-eight thousand? Very well. That’s what we’ve got here at home. But you’ll please count out another 17,000. They’re in the Coast Artillery, and have to man the harbor defenses of which we’ve been talking. Now you’ve got our mobile army—the actual force that we can put into the field and move around. Thirty-one thousand men.”
“A pretty straight tip,” agreed the Washington correspondents when they left the War Department. And as a straight tip they passed it on to their readers. So the Nation read the next morning how their army was being made ready. They read how four companies of one infantry regiment were gathered from Fort Lawton in Washington and another four companies from Fort Missoula in Montana. They read how still four other companies of the same regiment were at Madison Barracks in New York State.[5]
Their fifth Cavalry regiment, they learned, was being assembled like a picture puzzle by sending to Fort Myer, Virginia, for four troops of it, to Fort Sheridan, Illinois, for four more troops and a machine-gun platoon, and to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, for the remaining four troops needed to form a full regiment.
There was field artillery whose component units were scattered, guns, horses and men, from the Vermont line to the Rio Grande. There were signal troops in Alaska, Texas, the Philippines and Panama.
This was no such mobilization as that giant mobilization in Europe when a continent had stood still for days and nights while the soldiers moved to their appointed places. So far scattered was the American army, so small were its units, that only a few civilians here and there could have noticed that troops were being moved at all.
More than one un-military citizen, looking over his newspaper that morning, cursed the politics that had maintained the absurd, worthless, wasteful army posts, and cursed himself for having paid no heed in the years when thoughtful men had called on him and his fellows to demand a change.