In a certain town in the United States a sign in front of a theater
boldly announced: “No dogs or soldiers admitted.” After some complaint
the sign was taken down. And after the people of the community got to
know the soldier, they were sorry the sign had been put up.
Prejudice against the military man hasn’t ordinarily gone to that
length, but many citizens are at least disinterested. Not long ago I
was called upon to speak to a rather cultured group on the soldier’s
work. A few days later, an acquaintance, an intelligent, elderly woman,
met me on the street. “I liked the way you talked,” she said, “but
I’m not in sympathy with anything you spoke about. I don’t want to
hear about the soldier or anything military.” I thanked her for her
frankness, and dropped the matter, knowing it was useless to try to
give her the facts which are presented here, and which she probably
wouldn’t have believed anyway.
Here are some of the questions which have been asked me by educated
people: “What do you fellows in the army do when there’s no war? Do you
just go out and drill the boys and then loaf around? What’s the need
of an army in a depression? Where’s the army now? How big is it? What’s
the use of an army when we have an air corps?”
Whether or not such questions sound foolish, they do show ignorance
of what the soldier and the War Department are really doing. But the
citizen is not to blame for this lack of knowledge. A combination of
circumstances has deprived him of knowing what has happened and what
is happening with the military man. Certainly no true American wishes
to be unfair. First of all our school and college histories, our
literature, our entertainment have a habit of either misrepresenting or
omitting the actual deeds and purpose of the soldier. Second, anyone
associated with weapons usually has a bad name nowadays. Third, the
soldier, away off in our island possessions or in an army post, has
too little intimacy with the general run of people. Fourth, the name
War Department has a misleading sound. It makes us think of a great
mail-fisted demon, breathing fire and smiting with a red-hot sword.
Before we get through with the stories and facts given later, we’ll
see that it could much more faithfully be called the Peace Department.
Fifth, there’s the term “preparation for war,” which is about as far
from the truth about what the soldier is trying to do, as saying that
firemen are preparing to cause fires.
The soldiers in this country have never prepared to have a war and they
are not doing so now. They have always prepared _against_ war. There
is no place in our history where they have been the remotest cause of
war. And would you believe it, they have actually been the outstanding
pacifists of American History? You know it seems peculiar that the
trained fighter has done more for peace in this country than any other
class. But it is so. In normal times he has repeatedly saved us from
war. In public works he has been one of the chief builders of the
nation, if not the chief one. In disaster he has been the first on the
spot to restore order, and feed and shelter the helpless. In war he has
aimed to bring back peace and return the people to restful firesides,
with the least loss of life and treasure. A multitude of facts enforce
these statements--facts which can be verified in the archives in
Washington--facts which we have ordinarily been denied in our formal
education.
You know there’s a short paper about 150 years old that we Americans
are pretty keen about. In that document it says that Congress shall
provide for the common defense. And hand in hand with that provision
goes its twin brother--the general welfare. Our wise old forefathers,
who had plenty of time to reason, analyse, contemplate human nature
and be soundly practical, in contrast to us who must dash through this
complex civilization on high, used a sound bit of horse sense when
they coupled those two phrases. For it’s easy to see that you can’t
have general welfare without common defense any more than you can have
an undisturbed household without locks and policemen. Of course, we
need a little more than common defense to get general welfare in these
times, but that’s quite another subject. However, that business of
common defense brings the soldier onto the stage by our Constitution.
And one of the big tragedies of our country is that the stage failed
to produce him so many times until the play had actually begun. About
a million tombstones scattered in this country and in France can be
charged up to his absence when he was vitally needed. For it takes
time to train a soldier, and it’s pretty expensive and bloody to
train him when bullets begin to fly. Besides it makes the war drag
on. So you see the loss accumulates. I can make this idea clearer by
an illustration. Let us suppose you are a night watchman and have to
pace around a spooky industrial plant every night. And suppose your
employer armed you with a night stick, saying that firearms were
dangerous, expensive and might lead to trouble. You plead with him that
all you want is a decent break, that you’d like to have a pistol and
learn how to use it. He still contends that the night stick is good
enough. Sometime later a bandit scouts around the plant and sees you
wandering along with your club as your only defense. The next night
you see him entering a window. You chase him. He carefully aims, drops
you in your tracks, pilfers the cash box and makes a get away. Now
suppose thousands of watchmen are in the same fix. That in principle is
what has happened to our untrained men in all our wars. They haven’t
had a chance. And because they haven’t had a chance, they have come
home from the catastrophe with all sorts of ill-feeling against the
army, the soldier, the officer, when the fault has been not in the
military service, but in the neglect of proper training before the
enemy pounces upon us. Just how much waste and hardship to individuals
would result, if the country grocery store at Seven Corners had to
expand to a thousand chain-stores in thirty days? Can you imagine it?
And yet such an expansion is a drop in the bucket to what the Army
and the War Department have been compelled to produce in a twinkling,
when war caught us flat-footed. Of course, when we got into the World
War we were pretty lucky, for we had Allies who held off the enemy
for nearly a year before we had to go into real action. Just what
would have happened had we not had such a wall of strength in Europe
to stave off our enemies is not pretty to think about. As it was, many
an American went to the front untrained, unskilled, an easy prey to
disease and explosives. From this lack of preventive medicine, which
is what training in peace time amounts to, many men have come out of
our wars disgusted, and sayings have arisen which have put the army
in a mean light. There’s the word “soldiering” which oddly has come
to mean idleness. Yet if you were to go into any army post, any army
school, or any C.M.T.C. camp you’d see the soldier anything but idle.
Then there’s the term “passing the buck” which expresses an army habit
to some people. Just why it should, after your experiences and mine in
everyday life, is hard to explain. But the “old army game” is the one
we hear so often. It may mean anything from four-flushing to downright
crookedness. All these slanders seem to have arisen because men have
been rudely and unjustly snatched from the counter, the plough and the
mill to face a new desperate life, to live in mixed-up conditions under
hasty shelter, to find themselves square pegs in round holes, and to
be under officers as unskilled as they, officers not even a quarter
baked, whose leadership was too often faulty and cruel. How could it
be otherwise when we plunge fine young men who can’t swim into a raging
sea? These men come out of the conflict with heavy hatreds, justifiable
ones oftentimes, hatreds that go deep into their souls. And whom would
they hate? Naturally the professional soldier. He’s the one at hand.
But curiously enough it’s the trained soldier who has tried to prevent
the awful haste, waste and unnecessary mortality that have caused these
hatreds.
The American soldier is the last man to want war or the unnecessary
loss of life and treasure in war. He shies at war’s hardships, and the
added horrors, resulting from unpreparedness against war. He knows too
much about them to want himself or anyone else to be in a war. But he
feels that it’s not quite practical in the present state of the world
to say that there will be no more armed conflicts. With Europe seething
with hatreds, Japan flying at Asia’s throat, Russia making its militant
inroads, with no practical progress in abolition of war to date, with
industrial strife breaking out here and there, and with an Army of
organized crime in this country greater than the Army and Navy of the
United States, he feels it’s inviting disaster not to prepare against
war and calamity. So he’s out to reduce the tragedy when it comes, or
to stop it from coming by a proper show of force.
Do you know that one army officer, single-handed, without an army at
his back, saved or helped save this country from six big wars? And do
you know that another officer staved off another big war by being on
the spot with three trained corps? Do you know that many other officers
stubbornly opposed the powers in Washington when those powers wanted to
fight the Indian? Do you know who built all our first trails and roads
in the west and south? Do you know who constructed the first railroad
to span our United States from east to west? Do you know what the army
has done to help build this country in time of peace? Do you know that
one branch of the army alone has literally saved millions of lives in
peace time by its courageous discoveries and safeguards? Do you know
what another branch has done in the riddance of pests from industrial
plants? Do you know who laid the Alaskan Cable? Do you know that not a
single covered wagon ever reached the coast states in the west without
being accompanied by soldiers? We rarely hear the soldier mentioned
or see him shown in the movies in his protection of the wagon trains,
but there is no record of any of those trains ever reaching Oregon
or California over the wild prairie tracts unless soldiers went with
them. This is but one instance of the suppression of truth about the
soldier. We’re pretty well acquainted with what the soldier has done
in war. But do we know what he’s done for the up-building of men and
construction of public works in peace time? Do we know what he’s done
against war?
Listen to what comes next.
_II_