A Rifleman Went to War

Chapter 19. The Soldier in Battle

THERE is a universal curiosity about war. Of the great primary human impulses constantly manifested in the will to live, it is rather curious that this one, the impulse to kill, is the only one that is highly organized. In the matter of eating and mating we pursue our individual ways; but war is the most stupendous business on earth; it is the most highly organized and the most lavishly financed; it takes precedence over every other social activity, and women who have never done anything in their lives except to attend teas and entertain week-end guests turn out en masse to raise funds and stimulate patriotic fervor. It is a well known quirk of human nature that we like to do what is forbidden, and when it comes to defying the commandment which says that “Thou shalt not kill,” our efforts are set to martial music and the national tempo undergoes remarkable changes.

But it was not speculations of this sort that induced me to undertake this book. I don’t know just why I began it; but once I was setting about it, I was aware of a desire to answer a lot of questions, mostly those asked by soldier-friends who got to see little or nothing of the conflict. These questions were evidence of a practical sort of curiosity. I can best be regarded as a practical sort of soldier, not concerned with the moral or ethical aspects of war, but with the fact that it is. What about the Ross rifle? Did it fail you? What about these automatics that are to put it out of business? Did excitement or fright threaten to make worthless your ability to hold, to score with each shot? Where do pistols come in, anyway? It was questions of this sort — numbers of them, and not only about rifles — that I set out to answer. I am not a professional story-teller. I know that the foregoing chapters do not make a smooth-running story; but I hope that, somewhere in them, may be found the answers to some of these questions — and the provocation to ask, and honestly try to answer, a great many more; for national defense is still an important matter. For the rest, the story might well close anywhere. It is at best but a diffuse and disjointed record of the observations and experiences of a rifleman who went to war. There have been many books about the war; yet it remains as something of an anomaly in human experience, its interest never satisfactorily summarized or epitomized, even for themselves by those who took an actual and active part in it.

I have, of course, not attempted this. I shall be satisfied if I have answered a few questions to the partial satisfaction of a lot of men honestly interested in them. Yet what I have written is so fragmentary and incomplete that some summing up is necessary; for in answering these questions I have frequently emphasized one point; the value of rifle-training. With another word about the rifleman here, I shall go on to the larger implications of this sort of training. I think it will appear that the emphasis was justified.

Riflemen are not bom, they are made. In the early stages of American history, they were made by the sheer necessity of providing food for themselves and their families and of protecting themselves from the savage and war-like owners of the land they, the intruding white men, were determined to possess.

All the time the youth of that day were learning to shoot straight they were also learning the arts of concealment and of woodcraft that enabled them to steal upon their prey, whether it be human or four-footed, without being detected.

The riflemen of Morgan, of Marion and “Nolichucky Jack,” the men who followed John Rogers Clark to Kaskaskia and thence through the indescribable hazardous journey which won Vincennes — and, with it, the whole Northwest; the men who won the battle of King’s Mountain from the best rifleman officer who ever wore the King’s uniform, Captain Patrick Ferguson, all had their initial training in performing the ordinary routine work of their daily lives. Deer, turkeys and, in the very early days, buffalo and elk, furnished a large part of their larder. To successfully stalk and kill this game they must, inevitably, learn the stealth of the Indian or of the game itself. From those men and their achievements, came the slogan, “The Americans are a Nation of Riflemen.”

Yes, that’s right. They were. But, how about now?

Those men, with their woefully inadequate weapons, as measured by modem standards, successfully vanquished their human adversaries, largely because everybody was a rifleman; and their ability was not only in their marksmanship, but in their knowledge of woodcraft, their alertness, initiative and self- reliance under all circumstances. How many Americans, today, can even approach the state of perfection reached by those — our forefathers — in the rifle shooting game. (We call it a game. With them it was a business — a vocation.)

We are training men in the art — or, should I say, science — of rifle shooting. We train them on a range where everything runs on a hard and fast schedule. At eight o’clock, we know we can go to the six-hundred yard range and, upon reporting to target No. 69, will find a scorer and a range officer who will issue ten rounds of ammunition and tell us that we have just ten minutes to get rid of them. The target is fixed — in the same place it was yesterday; it won’t move — it will stay right there until we finish the ten shots and, moreover, someone down there will tell us just exactly where each bullet strikes.

Well, that’s fine. It is a great game, and we can learn a lot from it. We can learn just what we may expect from these rifles — at known ranges — and we can learn how to sight and hold and squeeze the trigger and all that.

But — and of all the BUTS in the world, this is the most serious — but when we go to war? What do we do then? There is no scorer or range officer or fixed target. Just a hell of a lot of other fellows shooting at us. Don’t know just where they are — somewhere over yonder — in that woods I guess.

Unless the rifleman has learned, in addition to his ability to hit a clearly visible target at an approximately known range, how to take advantage of all the available protective cover, he is surely out of luck (SOL, in short). It is up to him, personally and individually, for the protection of his own hide, to be able to locate the enemy and to place himself in a position where he can deliver effective fire upon said enemy. Failing in this, he can say his prayers, secure in the knowledge that his grateful country will put a nice little white cross over his grave.

What with tanks, machine guns, trench mortars, grenades — both hand and rifle — automatic rifles et cetera, it does seem that the rifleman has been driven back into his last ditch, the one he came from in the days when America was a “Nation of Riflemen.” If he is to survive at all, it must be because of his ability to go into battle as an individual, even though surrounded and flanked by thousands of other fighting soldiers. To be of any practical service whatever, he must be able to take advantage of cover, able to search out individual men of the enemy and, in the midst of all the turmoil of battle, to shoot and hit these individual targets.

It is not easy. Having tried it, I know.

But, by all the Gods of war, it can be done — and it is up to the riflemen of America, the real riflemen, who are really and truly endeavoring to fit themselves for war service, not only to qualify themselves, but to encourage a system that shall make available to as many men as possible, training that fosters the growth and development of the basic qualities that go into the making of a real rifleman.

Then, no matter how thorough this training and how well designed to approximate the conditions of warfare, the soldier will still be woefully unprepared for battle. I had had many years of it, and I was not prepared and just here, before going on to justify this insistence upon training in the effective use of the rifle under all conditions, I may as well say something about this inevitable unpreparedness. This involves not only the reaction of men to fatigue and discomfort and imminent death under all sorts of fantastic and gruesome conditions (all the “horrors of war” stuff) — not only this; but also the purely practical matter of our inability to know in advance the manner and methods that will suddenly develop in another war.

The first of these considerations is of course largely psychological; but the two are closely related, and the emphasis in another war may well be upon methods of instilling “psychological horror.” But it is all but useless, and certainly not my intention here, to attempt to say what the next war will be like. No one has yet told us what the last one was like. The strategists and tacticians will study it; and the rank and file may well do so.

What was it like? A number of my friends who have read extracts from these pages have criticized me for being so “cold-blooded,” as they phrased it, and have insisted that I should elaborate on the mental and physical sufferings of the actors. They — both men and women — have harped on this subject until I have come to dread having any of them visit me. But, just a few minutes ago, one of my good friends put it into new words. “Hell, Mac,” he said, “that’s fine, but you ought to put more misery into it.” As he was a soldier and went through several major battles, he probably has a vague notion of what he is talking about; but that phrase doesn’t define it at all. Misery wasn’t the dominant note for either of us. There was no dominant note. It was an