Puslapio vaizdai
PDF
„ePub“

Nor was misconduct under fire confined to the volunteers. A newly enlisted regiment of regular troops, with regular officers and a few months' training, broke into panic in the Philippine Islands before nothing more dangerous than a few stampeded carabao.

"But what happened in '98 would not happen now," men in my branch of the service say, and, I think, truthfully. The National Guard has improved many hundred per cent. since 1898. The tin soldiers resigned or were weeded out, and those that remained have worked diligently to impart the bitter lesson they learned. Picked troops of the National Guard would not now fail as certain picked militia regiments did in 1898, but that is a long way from being able to defeat German, French, Russian, Japanese, or Bulgarian trained soldiers.

We recognize physical courage as an attribute indispensable to manhood, like financial honesty and truthfulness. But whereas we inculcate the latter two by public opinion, practice, and coercion, we do not, under our present civilization, develop the former. The charge of cowardice would be bitterly resented individually and collectively, but one must recognize the growing tendency of men to acknowledge, partly through the development of false modesty, a lack of the courage without which no race can live. The people who sway public opinion dare not face the fact of undeveloped courage; yet the fact is here.

Is it in a nation of ready-made soldiers that one man can hold up and rob a trainful? How often is a professional slugger captured by irate citizens, be the citizens however preponderating in number? Yet one policeman will capture a gang of safeblowers and fight single-handed a whole crowd of professional thugs and murderers.

[blocks in formation]

by civil service from the average type of wage-earners. And as with policemen, so with firemen; the good system makes the hero.

That it is the system and not the man is further borne out by the vast superiority of the metropolitan policeman over the small-town constable. I remember an incident in a suburban town where a murderer was cornered by a mob in which were all the local policemen, none of whom dared approach him. There he stood like a boar at bay until a city policeman, in the country for an outing, attracted by the commotion, gave immediate expression to his training by rushing under an upraised hatchet and capturing the offender. Not until the struggle was entirely over did any one lend assistance to the volunteer officer. No lynching mob has ever taken a prisoner from a city policeman. How often have a sheriff and posse resisted one?

Railroad engineers seldom fail to show heroism in train wrecks, yet they hardly ever resist train-robbers. The reason for this apparent inconsistency is that they are mentally prepared for the first terror, but not for the second.

We have not been training men to resist the terrors of war, and so we have not got them in the numbers that other nations have them. The reason for this failure lies in the disbelief, entertained here and in the empire of Great Britain, which has mainly guided American thought in matters of international thinking, of the possibility of war between the great nations.

Great Britain has always maintained an overpowering navy, which has led her to luxurious ways. We have copied her ways, but not her navy. To this navy she owes her present freedom from conquest, for she has ignored her army and has hypnotized herself with talk of “volunteers." Great Britain has had certain advantages over the United States in the creation of a volunteer army. She has had closer intercourse with the military countries of the world. Following a bitter lesson in the Boer War, the rudiments of

military training have been taught in her public schools and universities.

She has a leisure class of aristocrats who have not learned military science, but have accustomed themselves to rigorous living by their athletic and nomadic habits, and by their adventurous lives and associations have in great measure prepared their minds for the stress of war. Our own idle rich boastfully liken themselves to this British aristocracy. Aside from richness and idleness, there is no resemblance. Our rich men's sons have been brought up by their mothers to represent the rich American woman's conception of English gentlemen. They have been trained in idleness, in contempt for democracy, in uselessness as far as business is concerned, but they have lacked the rough upbringing of the English boy. They have nothing. of his conception of duty to the nation at war. History shows that whereas the English upper classes have always thrown themselves upon the bayonets of their nation's foes, the rich Americans have shown less military willingness than the average of their countrymen.

England also has the benefit of frontier conditions continuing in many of her colonies-conditions which produced the best of our volunteer soldiers in all our wars up to and including the Spanish war. With us the frontier has passed away. To-day the young men of Arizona and Oregon are no better equipped for military service than the young men of Massachusetts or Virginia.

Following the British idea, we have thought much of race superiority and of our ability as a race to defeat other races. The Japanese victory over Russia showed that under favoring circumstances the yellow man could beat the white; but we, taking our opinion from the English, dismissed that lesson by underestimating Russia's ability. Now, however, a further military lesson stares us out of countenance. The British have been defeated not only by the Germans, but by the Bulgarians and also by the Turks, who were beaten by the Russians, who were defeated by the Japanese. Yet the British were

better equipped to organize for war than

we are.

The roar of cannon has awakened us to the fact that almost all nations of the earth are vastly more powerful on land than ourselves, chief among them Great Britain (with her year's preparation), Germany, France, Austria, Russia, Japan, Chile, and the Argentine Republic. Of these, England, Germany, and Japan have stronger navies than our own, while alliances between the other countries would give them a preponderance over us upon the sea.

We know that within three weeks of obtaining command of the sea, England, Germany, France, Austria, or Japan can land from two hundred thousand to four hundred thousand men upon the seaboard of the United States and follow this up at the rate of two hundred thousand men a month indefinitely, and that to meet this invasion the United States has only thirtyfive thousand trained men!

The National Guard of the United States approximates one hundred and twenty thousand men, but all of a year's training will be needed to put the whole of it in condition for war. In other words, we have thirty-five thousand men to meet the original invasion of two hundred thousand better equipped soldiers. In a year's time we can produce another one hundred and twenty thousand men to oppose the enemy, who would have two million four hundred thousand in the country and also would have possession of all our arms factories.

We are absolutely defenseless, as defenseless as China is before Japan, as defenseless as Egypt was before the Romans. The question of what we are to do to protect ourselves is as immediate as that question is to a man who sees a murderous burglar at his front door.

Evidently the first thing is to strengthen our regular army to the utmost. A plan for this has been presented by the general staff, which will allow garrisons in our strategic overseas ports strong enough to prevent their being immediately seized by the enemy, and which will leave in this

country four divisions, or 121,000 regular soldiers. These organizations would give us just a bare chance to fight off an enemy who should obtain command of the sea.

Hence we must develop an auxiliary, and develop that at once. Plans such as the Continental Army, popularly called the "jitney army," and the various schemes for universal military training, all of which are excellent, will not serve the immediate present.

For our crisis we have only one organization in existence, namely, the National Guard of the different States, and I, an officer of this service, have no exaggerated idea of the effectiveness of the National Guard as it now is.

I have shown elsewhere in this article that it is not in whole or in part to-day ready to meet the European soldiers in combat. On the other hand, it is nearer in efficiency to a regular organization than the Continental Army would be to it after its summer outings.

The military training of the National Guard is not that of the regular army; neither is it negligible. It stands to the latter as the night school does to the university.

But

A man, in order to qualify for the peaceful professions, such as medicine or the law, should have a university education, and after that a three- or four-year course in a first-class professional school. all doctors and all lawyers have not been able to obtain this training. There are hundreds of lawyers I know who have obtained their education at night school. They would have been glad for the supreme instruction, but they have taken full advantage of what facilities they could get. Many of them are first-class lawAll of them are evidently apart yers. from people who have never studied or thought of law.

So with the National Guard. Lacking regular army training, it has had, in fact, night-school training. Among its officers are a number who from native ability and great enthusiasm have learned much of the art of war. All of them, with the exception of that fraction of worthless peo

ple which one finds in every gathering, have learned more or less. The National Guardsmen are capable of great improvement, if given fair opportunity. The Government's assistance to it has been trifling in expenditure, but great in results.

A seriously intended appropriation for the National Guard which would supply the instruction that the better militia officers desire, as well as compensate the soldiers for their time, conditioned upon the achievement of a reasonable degree of efficiency, say like that of the regular army prior to 1898, would furnish a reserve of a quarter of a million of men in the shortest time-men who after two months' training following the outbreak of war could stand beside or against first-line troops.

The immediate adoption of these two steps is vital. Any other course will leave us helpless in the face of an armed world that hates, envies, and despises us. Later, legislation must be found to systematize and improve our forces until the nation is made impregnable. Of course if the National Guard organizations are to be permanently maintained, ways must be found to circumvent their present disabilitiesuse in strikes and the conflict of authority between State and nation.

All soldiers and many civilians now recognize that military effectiveness commensurate to the population of a nation can come only through a system whereby every citizen shall be allowed to learn to protect his nation from aggression abroad and his liberty from tyranny at home.

All of Europe, Japan, Chile, and the Argentine Republic have come to this form of training. Only Great Britain and the United States, nations which used to be the leaders in civilization, lag behind. England is to-day paying $24,000,000 a day and hundreds of thousands of lives in a struggle for continued existence because of the failure to demand of her citizens military service and to give in return humane living conditions. For not only from the military ignorance of her citizens is England suffering; their

unwillingness to enlist for war or for work in her defense is a problem of equal

terror.

The English gentleman, whom the nation treated overwell, has paid his debt to his utmost ability. The English working-man is exacting a heavy usury for the debt the nation owes to him.

It is not surprising to find in Germany, where an emperor's word approaches absolute law, greater military efficiency than in democratic England, but we are surprised to find there greater patriotism; to learn that in imperial Germany the average man has received more from the state, the privileged man has paid more to the state, than in democratic England. The strangest part of our discovery comes in realizing that the German achievements in equalizing conditions among the population have been more nearly copied in England than in the United States, and England's shortcomings are reproduced here in more acute form.

In the United States of America the average man pays a higher percentage of the national taxes compared with his affluent neighbor than he does in any other so-called civilized country. In the United States the very rich man pays a lower percentage in taxes and has greater legal privileges than do the aristocrats of Europe, and, unlike them, carries no legal or social liabilities.

The very class hatred which is rending England smolders more widely here, where it is also aggravated by geographical antagonisms. It has been the chief factor of internal politics for twenty years and is not even now in process of solution. In the event of a great war it would paralyze the nation. With what enthusiasm does any one think the American people would rush to arms to drive back an invader of the seaboard?

Eighty per cent. of the people of the United States look upon the great fortunes as ill gotten. The owners of these fortunes, for reasons satisfactory to themselves, have nearly all settled on one or the other sea-coast. Even where the evasion of taxes was not the incentive, this migra

tion has resulted in depriving the localities where the fortunes were made of taxes and of the benefit of the spending of the income and the support of local charities. The evils of absentee landlordism are already serious.

The "people back home" are hostile to the émigrées. New York and the Northeastern sea-coast are to them nothing but the homes of the dodging, obligation-shifting, idle rich, in whose behalf they would certainly feel no call to die. This rich element is itself non-military, and could furnish nothing for protection, nor would the not inconsiderable element depending upon it for ungenerous existence.

In addition to being the chosen home of those richest Americans who have not sought European domiciles, the Eastern sea-coast is the landing-point of foreign immigrants. Immigrants of long standing may have absorbed as much patriotism as the native born, but the newly arrived immigrants are still foreigners in thought and in law. In the event of invasion, thousands upon thousands of them would be legally bound to join the invaders, and none of them would be bound to help defend the country. As a foreign diplomat untactfully put it, "We have eight army corps in the United States." Immigrants of the neutral nationalities could not be looked upon as more than interested observers. There remains to volunteer enthusiastically for the defense of their firesides only a portion of the population of the sea-coast States; against them would be a large number of trained soldiers legally obligated to fight for the invader.

We present, therefore, an unorganized, unarmed nation filled with class and sectional bitterness, and with reinforcements for the invader awaiting him upon our shores. Mexico was no more ripe for the conquest of Cortez than we are ripe for conquest.

Two things must be done if this country is to endure. The existing evils must be remedied, and the people who are endeavoring to breed disintegration as a profession must be isolated and their influence destroyed.

[graphic][merged small]
« AnkstesnisTęsti »