"My country, 'tis of thee!" / Or, the United States of America; past, present and future. A philosophic view of American history and of our present status, to be seen in the Columbian exhibition.

by Willis Fletcher Johnson

There must be serious reason for this anomalous condition of the military force. Our soldiers are better fed, better clothed, and far better paid than those of any other country. An American soldier receives, outside of his allowance for rations and clothing, more money in a day than the British soldier can show to his credit in a week. His term of enlistment is shorter and his possibilities of duty are pleasanter, or should seem so to men of intelligence. Yet to enlist, which is the first suggestion that presents itself to a man out of work in a foreign country, seems to be the least popular in the United States.

Undoubtedly one reason is, that among the inducements to enlist, we are entirely lacking in anything that approaches the glory of war. Our only enemies are Indians, the meanest, most sneaking, most treacherous foemen that any civilized nation is fighting at the present time, and there is less glory in capturing one of them or a great many of them than in any taking of prisoners in ordinary war. The soldiers of other countries see at least a great deal of the pomp of war, if very little of its circumstance. Showy dresses, frequent parades, numerous occasions of display, encampment in the vicinity of large cities and towns, freedom to go about and spend money among civilized people, are all inducements to men to join and remain in a foreign army at the present time.

But what inducement is offered the American soldier? He is put in a camp of instruction as soon as he enlists, and sent to the border as soon as he is fit for service. The border is a delightful country, according to dime novels, but no sober man with his eyes open finds it anything but dull. It is a sparsely settled country, uninteresting to every one but the speculator and hunter. The soldier has nothing to speculate with, and is very seldom allowed to go hunting. He is kept within narrow bounds, sees almost no one but his own officers and comrades, has nothing but camp duty to do, except when on long scouts outside camp lines, or, still more unpleasant, when detailed for police, gardening, or other laborious duties within the camp. It naturally occurs to the American soldier that if he is to work eight hours a day in building houses or stables, or digging wells, or throwing up embankments, or ploughing the soil, or hoeing garden crops for the benefit of the post, that he might as well be doing the same sort of work in the States at a dollar and a half a day, and have his freedom between sunset and sunrise.

Except that police precautions against the Indians are still necessary, the only excuse that any one, except the military officer, seems inclined to discover for the existence of our army at all, is that we should have a nucleus of a military establishment in case of necessity. But what is the nucleus worth? Two thousand officers, among whom undoubtedly are a number of the best educated soldiers in the world, constitute nearly all of our military force upon whom we could confidently rely in case of trouble. The enlisted man, taking him as an average character, is practically worthless at a time when the enlargement of the army may suddenly become necessary. In France or Germany officers may at any time be selected from the ranks. Of course the systems of the two countries differ greatly from ours. Conscription and the requirement that every adult man shall serve a portion of his time in the army, makes a soldier of every one.

But is it not rather significant that the better class of men, to whom we would have to look for additional officers in case of the necessity of suddenly making a large army, are seldom found among our own regulars? Some of the reasons for this deplorable deficiency of valuable material have already been suggested. There is nothing to induce a man to enter military life, and the enlisted man is too frequently used as a common laborer.

But beside this, there is a greater grievance. It is that ours is as aristocratic an army as any in the world, and that the distance of the officers from the enlisted men is so great as to be simply immeasurable. Volunteers used to grumble that some of their officers “put on airs.” It is scarcely fair to say that regular officers put on airs, but it certainly is true that the enlisted man, as a rule, is generally treated by his superiors as a being of an entirely different order. Few men rise from the ranks. Some men now high up on regimental rosters used to be private soldiers, and a few instances of the kind occur nowadays, but the vacancies are too few to attract good men to the ranks. Let any one live at a military post a little while and explain, if he can, how any one with sufficient self-respect to be fit for military rank of any kind can bring himself to enlist in the United States army at all.

All this could be changed, without increasing the numerical strength of the army, by an entire change of method which would not create any friction, disorganization or reorganization, but which nevertheless would encourage a better class of young men to enlist—a change which, indeed, would secure some of the very best in the country. An army so small as ours should be in the highest sense a military school. There is nothing to prevent it. There is no army which has more leisure at its disposal or officers more competent to act as instructors. No army in the world has a greater percentage of highly educated officers. No country can show a larger proportion of well-educated, restless, unemployed, aspiring young men. There is no engineering party for a railroad, a mine, a river improvement association, a drainage company or anything else requiring applied mathematical and mechanical skill but can secure a large staff of intelligent young men at an expense not exceeding that of the ordinary soldier. These men generally work harder and fare worse, regarding personal comfort, than the meanest of soldiers, yet they are not only entirely satisfied with their chance, but elbow each other fiercely in their desire to get it.

Suppose that instead of selecting men merely for their physical quality and their supposed capacity for obedience, the standard of admission to the ranks of the army should be as high as that of admission to West Point. Suppose the Government were to assure the people that the recruits would be treated as well as the cadets at the military or naval academy; in an instant the army might have its choice from a hundred thousand intelligent, well-born, well-bred, honorable, aspiring young men. As already said, there is no trouble in getting any quantity of men of this class to go out under the control of engineers for hard and unpleasant duty. The inducement, beside the financial compensation, is that they will be enabled to fit themselves, at least to some extent, for the class of work which their superiors are already engaged in. They are close observers, earnest students, intelligent assistants, and the beginning of many an engineer, now prominent, has been in just such parties.

The United States army might as well be one great school of engineering and military tactics. It is well known that the mere company drill, which is almost all the drill the American soldier is ever subjected to, thanks to the distribution of the force in such a way that scarcely any regiment has been together within a single period of enlistment of any soldier in the army, requires very little time. It is no harder to become proficient in than that of the militia of the various States and cities. Indeed, with company drills once a week, almost any militia regiment or company can present a finer appearance upon parade than any but two or three “show” companies of regulars. The remainder of military life consists in guard duty, the details of camp duty and of applied engineering, which each man can learn as rapidly by experience as an equal number of assistants in a construction party anywhere else. It is known well enough at the West that the construction parties of railways contain, beside a mass of common laborers, a great many intelligent young fellows who have put on flannel shirts and cow-hide boots, have taken pick and shovel and wheelbarrow, not so much for the wages that are paid them as for what they are learning of the art of railroad building. If such men can put up with the treatment ordinarily accorded the section hands of a railway constructing party, they certainly would be satisfied with the manners of officers of the United States army.

But—and here is an important distinction—no railway boss, however much of a tyrant he may be, would dare to order one of his hands to cook his supper or wait at his table or groom his horse or do any other service of the quality commonly known as menial, but the American soldier in the regular army is sometimes obliged to regard such demands as a matter of course.