held that battles were won by orders, by masses of men trained to strict obedience and sent forward as a machine to conquer by sheer weight. On the contrary it was an axiom with the British that the greatness of an army rests with its men, not in the individual exploits of the men, but in closely organized action. This, of course, is not to be secured by constant direction by an officer, however efficient and ubiquitous he may be; it is not a matter of strict obedience to orders. It depends to a great extent upon the various qualities covered by that convenient blanket- term, esprit-de-corps. It is through this that any real unity of action is secured. This, of course, is a truism; yet it is often the obvious that is missed, and, if seen, is quite likely to be unappreciated and inadequately understood, its very obviousness making it seem a simple effect to achieve.
Whenever I pass Vancouver Barracks, it always seems perfectly clear to me that we have missed it. The Seventh Infantry happens to be stationed there at the present time. My father’s father served with that regiment — and died with it, in Mexico. It has a glorious record of achievement; it may be a fine regiment now, and quite fit to carry on that record; but the record does not belong, peculiarly, to the present members; the regiment is no longer the Old Seventh Infantry, built of the pride and fine spirit of a particular locality, handed down from generation to generation, a ready atmosphere for the new recruit, with a minimum of racial antagonism and sectional prejudice. General Pershing objected — and rightly — to simply using the various units of the United States Army as feeders for the older and better trained — but strange — organizations of the French and British services; yet that is exactly what was done with our men at home. It didn’t matter whether they came from Florida or Oregon, they were split up and slapped in with men from Maine and Kansas. This action, presumably, was based upon an assumption of national unity. Such a unity is fine from a civic or political viewpoint or as defining the civilian attitude toward the army. But as a basis for building up a fine military organization it is worse than useless. A fine army is not made up of men, but of crack army corps composed of divisions each proud of its own distinctions, distinctions which rest upon the excellence of its command and of the various brigades and services of which it is made up; and the brigades look, not to the men, but to the command again, to the regiments and the several complements of its establishment, and these are matters of pride only as the companies are up to scratch. It is here, and in even smaller units, that the men come in. Men aren’t proud of an army, but of the high standing and smart appearance of their particular section and company. If this gets the Old Man’s eye and stings the other companies to come up to it, then you are in a fairway to having a fine regiment, and so in turn a good brigade.
Of course, this is more of the painfully obvious; it is the simple fundamentals of organization; it is inescapable. And it is a thousand times more important when we move from this purely mechanical business to the effort to achieve the various abstract and indefinable qualities that go to make up what is esprit de corps. Yet, here we have ignored it, ruled out the essential and set up an arbitrary scheme for something which certainly cannot be imposed arbitrarily. It is not simply a matter of our refusal to allow the military organization to take shape readily and easily from civil life, of disregarding natural sectional feeling and interposing sectional strangeness and antagonism. In doing this we have also destroyed the continuity of the regiment. Soldiers die or are super-annuated, but tradition and history live on and grow with the years, accumulating and solidifying. Let the Second Ohio forever remain the Second Ohio, always recruited from the same localities. A soldier is little concerned with the personal qualities of a soldier in another division, but his own excellence depends to a great extent upon the man next to him. When, of these two, one is a hill-billy from Kentucky and the other an East-side Jew they cannot be expected to get along very well together. In a peace-time establishment they may be counted upon to wear off the edges, come to some measure of appreciation of each other’s peculiar qualities, and overcome the arbitrary and foolish handicap. But peace-time establishments should provide the framework for full war-time strength, and it is here that the value of tradition comes in. If the regiment is always recruited from the same localities, the new recruit, hastily trained in an emergency, fits smoothly and harmoniously into an organization with which he is already familiar; on the part of the old men he is willingly received, and for his own part, anxious to justify this reception.
The value of this is perfectly exemplified in the organization of the British Army, and I am going to devote a paragraph or two to this, not because I think the British soldier is superior to ours, but because I am convinced that the United States soldier is potentially the finest soldier in the world and that he was not given a chance to realize his potentialities. But first, and in order to illustrate this, I want, briefly to make the comparison a triple one. In the German Army the emphasis was upon orders, carried out by mass formations. They abandoned this, or attempted to, perhaps largely because of the exigencies of trench warfare. But that was the theory; the German soldier was but a unit in the mass, and when the mass was broken up he was inclined to surrender. He did not depend upon himself and his comrades, as such, but upon the mass; the German unit of morale was the Fatherland, the arbitrary and pretentious will of the Kaiser and his henchmen, even though the divisions preserved their sectional integrity. There was little effective unity of action once the mass was broken. The result was German prisoners, in great batches, with their hands up. The Americans were never in danger of doing this. But what is the danger which is being invited by this hasty scrambling together of men widely different in temperament and character, antagonistic as to racial and personal habits, and with no common tradition of achievement back of them? What is the greatest danger to which such an ill-assorted unit, in which half the men mistrust the dependable qualities of the other half, may expose itself when the attack is checked and enemy machine-guns find their targets held up for murderous fire? Well, here is what is being invited: The few men who know each other get together in such numbers as find themselves in touch — two, three or a half-dozen — and proceed to do something about it: “All right, fellows, let’s go; to hell with that gang; we can’t stay here and be shot down with a lot of god damned Kykes.” They may cover themselves with glory. But the company, despite their heroism, may suffer disastrous defeat. In any case, the essential unity of action is destroyed. I have thought this matter over many times since my little period of service. Frequently, it took the form of visualizing just what could be done with a regiment of real soldiers, every man exemplifying those individual qualities that are considered typically American, and all working smoothly together, each depending not only upon himself, but also upon the added strength that comes from the sure knowledge that he can count upon every single man in the company. We are not getting this effect as long as we take pains to destroy this solid sense of mutual dependability in the very outset.
Precisely here lies the strength of the British Army. The regiments are recruited by localities, availing themselves of all the common associations of civilian life. In war-time, the regiment may send out several battalions. They all belong to the regiment. Their achievements become not only a part of the history of the army but of the locality. The new recruit is not taken into a hastily formed organization; he is admitted to an institution, along with a lot of others whose qualities he pretty well knows. They are raw. While the drill-sergeant is turning them into soldiers, a lot of other things — not forgetting a stirring necessity within themselves — is turning them into a unit. Their first night in barracks, is quite as valuable as their first day on the drill-ground, for it is there that they begin to realize what it means to “belong to the regiment”. The regiment has the names of a hundred battles, the history of three centuries, on its colours. His great-great-grandfather, possibly, died with it. Unity of action cannot be secured by commands in the field, and esprit de corps cannot be imposed arbitrarily. It is a thing of growth.
The British go much further in their efforts to take advantage of local spirit and pride. The Scotsman wears his native costume. This is a departure for which we have no occasion; yet it may be considered, as illustrating the strength to be gained from sectional prejudice and racial pride. Its allowance is not a mere negative matter, a concession to local feeling. The Scot could probably have been brought to adopt the khaki trousers, and the Gordons would then have appeared in something like uniformity with a regiment from Devonshire. But this semblance of uniformity would do much to destroy the vital unity. The kilt is not a whim, nor merely something that added color, and excited some curiosity, in the British parade.
It did excite a good deal of curiosity, by the way. Many a good old French woman, sometimes with not six sound teeth in her head, turned out as often as the Jocks passed through the village. Her curiosity might have taken many turns, but it was usually expressed in the not entirely innocent wonder — to judge by the sly smile — if there was anything underneath it. Sometimes she endeavored, with her stick, to lift the skirt in order to find out. With the real Scot, of course, there wasn’t — nothing, that is, in the way of trewes, for although these were issued they were not always worn. Later in the war, I believe, it was considered necessary to order that they be worn in London; or else the gallant Scot, on leave, was kindly asked to take an inside seat in the London bus. The upper deck of these vehicles — in case you don’t know them — is reached by a steep circular stairway from the rear platform. Passengers on the platform, and the nearby crowd on the curb, had no trouble satisfying any curiosity as
