The sentinel joins his leader and passes on to relieve the other sentinels. Meanwhile the hands of the clock indicate nine-thirty. The “Hell Cats” sound the tattoo. For the next half-hour the barracks are animated with cadets running up and down stairs to the showers, with the noise of beds being made down and water drawn. Gradually ten o’clock draws near. The Officer of the Day standing in the Area turns to the musicians:
“Sound taps!” he commands.
Thump! Thump! Thump! goes the drum in measured beat.
“Li-i-i-i-i-ghts out!” call the subdivision inspectors. The windows of the barracks seem to blink for a moment and then darkness envelops all of the rooms.
And so ends the day that has been continually under the eyes of the Tactical Department. The next day will be the same and the next and the next. Next year, too, the mills of the Gods will be grinding away bending, twisting, shaping Mr. Ducrot for his future work. No act of his is passed unnoticed or unrecorded. Every time that he performs a duty the “Tacs” give him a mark that goes toward determining his standing in military efficiency and deportment. This is as it should be because the attitude toward duty that he displays as a cadet is a good indication of his future attitude as an officer, and to deny to merit, talents, and acquirements their just rewards would be to check the emulation which brings genius into action and qualifies the industrious student to become an ornament to his country.
The object of the Tactical Department is to make the cadets loyal, obedient, and disciplined young soldiers. It requires them to perform all of the duties of the enlisted men of the Army as a method of understanding what an officer can demand of his men. They can then go to their regiments with a sympathetic understanding of the trials and thorns in the path of the men for whose lives they are responsible. Moreover the “Tacs” aim to give the cadet a good training in the fundamental principles of the tactics of each arm so that he leaves the Academy prepared to take up the duties of a subaltern. He is not supposed to leave West Point with the knowledge of a colonel as some seem to think.
In our present war with Germany, West Point will continue to send forth her product as heretofore to help train the immense number of recruits for the new Army. They will be called upon to train also the new officers that are needed for the large force that we will raise, and to this task they must bring not only a practical knowledge of certain drills, but a mind capable of thinking straight. They will lend all of the aid that is possible but they realize also that in training officers, drill and mechanical maneuvers, however useful they may be, are subordinate to the more rare and difficult acquirements that alone can produce accomplished and scientific officers. What is chiefly needed in an officer is acuteness of intellect, either the result of genius or habits of reasoning on scientific subjects. To this of course must be added tactical knowledge, the foundation of which is securely laid at West Point.
In the immense army that will soon be ours, the graduates of West Point will indeed be a small leaven, but I am confident they will bring to this mass of raw soldier material the ideals and the spirit of their Alma Mater. They will not forget the lessons learned at her knee, but will justify to the nation that has given them their education the soundness of West Point’s methods of training officers.