How about giving our imaginations a little exercise for a minute before
we start in on the evening’s story. Are we set for the effort? Well,
here’s the picture. Just suppose a great plague of flu were to sweep
this country from end to end. And suppose there were not a single
doctor or nurse in the United States. Now suppose that Congress, all
excited, voted great numbers of doctors and nurses to stem the scourge.
Well, how many people would die, and how much neglect and horror would
visit our doorways, while the doctors and nurses were being trained
and educated? Just go over in your mind that little chaos and you have
almost a view of the War of 1812--almost--for then we went this fancied
epidemic one better. We didn’t provide training and education at all
for the doctors and nurses--the officers and men of that calamity. The
plague of war just went along from bad to worse--and then from worse
to awful. There was much excuse for our slips before and during the
Revolution, when we were a loose lot of colonies and were divided into
Whigs and Tories. But by 1812 we had been a nation for over twenty
years. Few realized then, and some don’t now, that the soldier needs
just as much preparation and education as the doctor and the nurse.
For preparedness against war and shortening a war amount to a vast
science and art which cannot be trusted to quacks without undue loss
of life to our sons. After our narrow escape from this plague of 1812,
when our enemy providentially was called back to Europe, we didn’t do
away with our preventive medicine, as we did after the Revolution. No
sir, we kept that training for three whole months. Then we reduced
it to ten thousand men on paper. Five years later, in the face of
protests by such men as John C. Calhoun, we cut it to six thousand
men. Then the Seminoles, Creeks and Black Hawk promptly entered into
the gentle art of taking scalps. Settlers were slain. Dade’s Command
of one hundred seven officers and men marching on a peaceful errand
were massacred. Other officers and civilians were mowed down. Cholera
attacked the troops against Black Hawk, and yellow fever took its toll
of those against the Seminoles. In the Florida, Georgia and Alabama
country a force of less than a thousand trained troops tried to keep
safe a vast unexplored country against three thousand Indians. By 1834,
for the whole of the United States, less than four thousand troops
attempted to guard over ten thousand miles of seacoast and frontier
for fifteen million people. Two years later, after these killings
had been going on for some time, our legislators with frenzied haste
voted our army to be raised back to ten thousand. But the troops could
not be had or trained in time. So the slaughter went on. Mr. Hearst
quotes Alfred Henry Lewis as saying that a Congressman is like a man
riding backwards in a train. He never sees anything till after it has
passed. Well, that may be a little unfair to our legislators, but it
surely applied to these enactments. For what happened afterwards?
The usual waste and ineffectiveness. General after general on the
frontier asked to be relieved of command because of the impossibility
of the task, the smallness of the force and the wholesale, needless
deaths. Of the trained men in this Seminole War over forty-one per
cent perished--nearly half of all the troops--and to little purpose.
One hundred seventeen of our best officers, in one year, seeing the
fruitlessness of their services resigned from the army rather than
to be a party to stagnation. Among them were such prominent men as
Horace Bliss, W. C. Young, R. R. Parrott, Alexander D. Bache, Albert
Sydney Johnston, N. B. Buford, Leonidas Polk, Jefferson Davis, Joseph
E. Johnston and George G. Meade. By 1842 the army in the face of the
want of a strong national police force was reduced to eighty-six
hundred and thirteen men. A Congressman on the floor of the house
stated in that year: “We have no prospects of war. We have more reason
to suppose that the world will grow wiser and that the humane and
oft-repeated wish of the wise and good, that the sword and bayonet may
be converted into the scythe and ploughshare, will be realized.” We
have no prospects of war! Four years after this statement, came the War
with Mexico like a bolt out of the red, white and blue. It found our
seventeen million people with an army of fifty-three hundred men all
told, or what would correspond for a university of seventeen hundred
students to a football squad of six men. Six whole men. Think of that.
A line, all but one man, no backs and no substitutes. Of course, you
couldn’t play the game at all, under those circumstances. Well, as
the Mexican War was in sight General Zachary Taylor had to. He had to
fight with less than that. He had just three thousand troops against a
possible fifty thousand Mexicans. Even so, his command was the largest
regular force we had assembled since the Revolution. Whatever the
rights and wrongs of this war were, Taylor was in a perilous position.
When hostilities came, he had to go forward with his little band of
trained soldiers. Against superior forces he won the battles of Palo
Alto and Resaca de la Palma. Then he was held up. Untrained volunteers
poured in upon him too late--right in the midst of campaign--just
as applicants for a medical school might rush in and clog up a busy
hospital. Imagine that situation, hundreds of novices running around
the corridors and into the wards of a big hospital. Would the doctors
be crazy? Taylor’s position was worse. The government had forced him
to keep these men in his institution and many of them hadn’t the
inclination to learn, many had come out for a lark, and all of them had
to be taught from the ground up obedience, punctiliousness, cleanliness
and the technique and character of the soldier if they weren’t going
to _run_ or be uselessly _killed in battle_. It took four months’
waiting and preparing in a hostile country before Taylor could go into
his next engagement. Besides he couldn’t get enough transportation.
But he had one big advantage over leaders in 1812 and the Revolution.
West Point was beginning to account for itself--not because it was West
Point, nor because I would emphasize the United States Military Academy
unduly, but because it was the only place in the Western Hemisphere
_then_ where a man could get four years’ training and education toward
being a doctor for the plague of war. Five hundred West Pointers--the
Grants and Stonewall Jacksons as lieutenants and captains, made things
easier for Taylor, and other West Pointers, like Jefferson Davis, were
coming back to the colors with the volunteers. So Taylor, after his
green men had been taught something, won the battle of Monterey. But
these victories weren’t getting us anywhere. They were just scattered
first downs. Taylor was much like the hen that pecks, but has nothing
to cackle about. Over his advance into nowhere the administration was
beginning to be nervous. He could scarcely have been called an educated
soldier. On the contrary, Winfield Scott, the commanding general of
the army in Washington, was professionally trained and self-educated
to the point of brilliance. For a long time Scott had told Polk and
Marcy, just what would end the war quickly--a strike at the very heart
of Mexico--nothing less. But the powers wouldn’t listen to him, scoffed
at him, called him visionary. The quacks were ridiculing the doctors.
But when Taylor got nowhere more leisurely, the administration threw
up its hands and chucked the whole affair into Scott’s lap, because
the people were becoming restless for a solution. Yes, the President
gave permission to Scott, but he had called Scott’s plan visionary,
and therefore had to prove his point by taking a pot shot at Scott’s
efforts when he could safely do so from executive cover. In spite of
this double-crossing, Scott finally got enough troops at Vera Cruz
to start shoving through to the finish. Meanwhile Taylor, who could
scarcely have been accused of planning his battles with knowledge and
decision, won Buena Vista. A number of trained subordinates, such as
Wool and Jefferson Davis, together with seasoned troops were mainly
responsible for the victory. But beyond drawing a large part of the
Mexican Army away from Scott, it did not accomplish much toward ending
the war. Scott had given it out that he was going to conquer a peace
and he was determined to do so with all speed. By skill and energy
he took Vera Cruz with only twenty losses to his troops. But then he
was met with horrible obstacles. Polk had not kept his part of the
bargain--to send the rest of the troops, transportation and supplies.
Yellow fever would soon be attacking the forces in this low country.
Scott pushed on toward the highlands anyhow with what he had. At
Cerro Gordo he faced a natural stronghold in the mountains that was
terrifying. With excellent scouting and planning, with the aid of able
subordinates such as Robert E. Lee, he pushed through the scowling,
fortified barrier and sent the Mexicans flying, pursuing them as far as
he could.
But then came the rub. Jalapa. Have you ever heard of Jalapa? Well, it
was another Valley Forge in our history, a Valley Forge in a hostile
country far from home. There, seven regiments and two companies of
Scott’s volunteers went home in a body because their enlistments
expired. Over thirty-six hundred men left him, and nothing could stir
their patriotism to remain. His force was reduced to less than seven
thousand in the face of twenty thousand Mexicans. Also James K. Polk
was continuing his undercutting work at home. Scott was being too
successful and would be too strong politically. So money and recruits
did not arrive. The troops were not only low in numbers, but in
spirits, too. Scott pleaded in vain with the government for the life of
his men and honor of our country to send him what he needed. Some of
his troops were beginning to feel it was no use trying to go forward.
It was all they could do to survive now in the center of Mexico. One of
his generals advised going back. Would they have to give up? It was a
desperate situation. But Scott meant to go forward. He began by winning
over the hostile inhabitants through his kindly, square treatment. They
grew to like him better than their own leader, Santa Anna. He kept
his troops in hand and generally well-behaved. So he was finally able
to barter with the inhabitants and get food for his men. He pushed on
toward Puebla without the money and recruits promised him. Finally,
after two months’ delay, fresh troops and money came. Even though he
had only ten thousand seven hundred eighty-one effectives, mixed with
green men, he went further onward immediately. Came the victories of
Contreras, Churubusco, Molino del Rey, Chapultepec and Mexico City. The
capital was taken and the war was over. In six months, trained troops,
trained subordinates and a trained commander had marched through the
heart of a hostile country, against vastly superior numbers of the
enemy, against a bloodsucking administration at its back, and had
conquered a peace, as Scott had said he would. Had his advice in the
first place been heeded, the war, the sufferings, the deaths, and the
expense could have been cut in less than a fourth. But again the value
of training and education for a plague had been flouted. Yet training
and training alone had won for us our first successful war on land. And
from it came a third of the present area of the United States, which we
weren’t loath to accept.
And the cause of our success? Well, we must be frank and honest. We
must admit that the opposition wasn’t really first class. Had it been,
dear knows what beatings our paltry number of trained troops would have
taken. But the Mexicans were by no means as weak as we were in 1812. If
they had been, we could have walked into the Mexican capital without
much more than a loud booh. We mustn’t get the idea that the Mexicans
couldn’t fight. They disputed the way so hotly at Contreras and Molino
del Rey, that it looked for a time very doubtful for the United States.
It was no afternoon’s parade such as the British had had into our
capitol.
But our quality was superior and we could force our way through the
opposition. Why? Well, Scott tells you, Scott, who was not a West
Pointer. He said that had it not been for the graduates of the Academy,
the war would have lasted four or five years, with more defeats than
victories in the first part. At any rate, these young men proved to be
a great foundation for efficient leadership. Specialized education and
training whether or not by West Point had saved money and life in this
war, despite untrained inpourings, despite a hampering administration,
and despite our pitiful numbers.
But let us hark back to a piece of irony. In the previous years before
this war, _twice had Congress tried to abolish West Point_, and _once_
it made no appropriations for it, so that the Superintendent at his
own risk had to borrow $65,000 from a private individual to keep it
going. What ugliness would have been added to our history, had the
abolitionists been successful? What shame and slaughter would have come
had the President _not_ been forced to let Scott carry out his plan?
Is it to laugh or weep at the sentimentalists who would do away with
the doctors and squander human life? Well, let’s see the Civil War
next. Not so pretty--what?
_VII_