Some of my friends in a certain cadet class beset me to write a West
Point story; promising me incidents at will, a plot, a name, and a
tactical officer for "the villain." Perhaps it was because I declined
this last sensational detail that they backed out of all the rest, and
having given my boat a shove into deep water, left me to row and pilot
as best I might.
However, help came from other men, in other classes. I was cheered on
in my work, and given story after story, with full leave to use them as
I chose; and so it falls out that my book is quite true.
Not that all the happenings ever came to any one cadet, or within the
bounds of any four years' course. But they have almost all, at some
time, been part of somebody's cadet life at West Point. With what men,
or in what years, it does not matter: the last decade of the nineteenth
century nearly enough covers the whole.
I have tried hard to have the small technicalities quite correct. Yet
as rules do vary now and then, even at West Point, everything may not
always _seem_ right, to this or that graduate. And, of course, I may
have blundered here and there.
Certain points in cadet life I was especially asked to handle; and if
once or twice I have told only what _might_ have been, even there I had
the warrant of cadet opinion.
As for the fancy names, it was so hard to find plain ones that were
not down in some Army List or Visitors' Book, that I made up a few,
choosing rather to give caps which nobody would put on than others
quite sure to be appropriated. Truly, I did not name Miss Dangleum: a
young officer did that, and Cadet Devlin was also dubbed by one who
knew.
Since certain words of my story were written a few changes have come
in. The cadet classes have pledged themselves to abolish hazing;
the Hundredth Night (in its old wild glee) has been forbidden; the
Cadet Howitzer is spiked. The shady nooks along "Flirtation" have
been cleared up; Fort Clinton is a memory, the tents are brown, and
Dade's white shaft now stands in the gayest and sunniest of all the
thoroughfares. But human nature survives,--and "boodle"--and the girls,
so that my book is declared to be still "absolutely true."
Sometimes when I watch that grey throng in the Chapel, I have a great
wish that I could see the other little army with whom they are to join
hands. So much depends on them. For womanhood sets the standard for the
world of men.
"She's like the keystone to an arch,
That consummates all beauty;
She's like the music to a march,
That sheds a joy on duty."
Such she should be.