CALL FOR THE NATIONAL GUARD, OUR CITIZEN SOLDIER.
Enthusiastic Answer to the Call--Requirements of the War
Department--Who May Enlist--How the Army was Formed--In the
Training Camps--The American Makes the Best Soldier--The "Rough
Riders"--Cowboys and Society Men--Their Uniforms and Their
Weapons--Their Fighting Leaders.
If all the men who showed a desire to answer the call to arms had
been accepted, no nation in the world could have boasted of a
larger army. The demand was so limited and the supply so great
that many more had to be refused than were accepted, and many of
the National Guard, who were given the preference in all the
States, were rejected at the final examination, because they
lacked some of the qualifications necessary in a soldier of the
United States.
According to the requirements of the war department applicants for
enlistment must be between the ages of 18 and 35 years, of good
character and habits, able-bodied, free from disease and must be
able to speak the English language. If one is addicted to the bad
habit of smoking cigarettes it is quite likely that he will not
pass the physical examination. A man who has been a heavy drinker
is apt to be rejected without ceremony.
Married men will only be enlisted upon the approval of the
regimental commander.
Minors must not be enlisted without the written consent of father,
only surviving parent, or legally appointed guardian. Original
enlistment will be confined to persons who are citizens of the
United States or who have made legal declaration of their
intention to become citizens thereof.
These requirements fulfilled a man is permitted to take the
physical examination. Few understand just how rigid this
examination is. Many have been rejected who thought that they were
in perfect physical condition. A number of applicants who were
confident that they would be allowed to enlist were rejected by
the physicians on account of varicose veins. Varicose veins are
enlarged veins which are apt to burst under the stress of long
continued exertion. Closely allied to this is varicocele, which
threw out a surprisingly large proportion of the National Guard
and the recruits.
After a man is weighed and his height taken, he is turned over to
the doctor, who places the applicant's hands above his head and
proceeds to feel his flesh. If it is soft and of flabby fiber the
physician is not well pleased and if he finds that the bones are
too delicate for the amount of flesh he turns the applicant down.
Fat men, however, get through if their bones are solid and there
is no organic weakness of any description. To discover the
condition of the heart the applicant is made to hop about five
yards on one foot and back again on the other. The doctor then
listens to the beating of the heart. He lifts his head and says to
some apparently fine-looking specimen of manhood the simple word:
"Rejected."
This man has heart trouble, and, strange to say, he does not know
it. If a man be of a pale complexion or rather sallow, the doctors
will question him with regard to his stomach. Of course the lungs
are thoroughly tested. It is not often, however, that any one
presents himself who is suffering from lung trouble. One man in
particular was rejected because of the formation of his chest. He
was what is commonly known as "pigeon-breasted." The doctors said
that there was not enough room for air in the lungs, and yet the
rejected applicant was a well-known athlete.
But after all organic centers have been found in excellent
condition several things yet remain to be tested. A man's feet
must not blister easily. His teeth must be good, because bad teeth
interfere with digestion and are apt to develop stomach troubles.
Of course other things taken into consideration a particular
defect may be overlooked according to the discretion of the
doctor. A man with his index finger gone stands no show.
A bow-legged man will be accepted, but a knocked-kneed man rarely.
The final test is of the eyes. At a, distance of twenty feet one
must be able to read letters a half inch in size. Many tricks were
played to read the letters when the eager candidate could see only
a blur before him. The favorite method was to memorize the letters
from those who had taken the examination and knew in just what
order the letters were situated.
HOW AN ARMY IS FORMED.
The making of an army--that is what it means to turn men of peace
to men of war, to fit the mechanic or the business man, the farmer
or the miner, for a passage at arms with a foreign foe--has been
for the present generation a matter of conjecture and of lessons
drawn from previous passages in the nation's chronicles. In our
war with Spain it became a fact, and the progress made in the
various stages forms a chapter in the public history which is as
interesting as any of those conquests of either peace or war which
brighten for every American the pages of the achievements of the
Union of the States.
It is impossible to tell just how an army is made. During the long
debates which preceded the declaration of war, eloquent men on
both sides of the chambers of Congress pictured the strength of
American arms, the shrillness of the scream of the eagle, and the
sharpness of his talons, and applauding galleries saw in the
coming combat little but the calling out of the vast body of the
reserve strength of the American people, its marching upon the
enemy, and return, bearing captured standards and leading
prisoners in chains, to the music of the applauding nations, and
the thanksgiving of a people made free by their struggles. The
other side was never touched. The nights of toil by staff
officers, the multiplied forces of mills and factories, the shriek
of the trains crossing the continent, bearing men and munitions,
and the hours of waiting for the completion of those warlike
implements which the peaceful American has never before
contemplated in the expansion of his industrial institutions, were
entirely overlooked.
Not by all, however, for, from the moment the conflict seemed
inevitable, stern-eyed men who had fought before began to count,
not the cost, but the hours between the giving of an order and its
fulfillment, between the calling and the coming, and finally when
the results of their labors were completed the story of what they
did may be partly told.
All the processes of making a soldier are as distinct as are those
which mark the seed time and the harvest, the milling and the
making of the loaf. It can be readily seen that in a country where
the standing army is but 25,000, and the militia forces of the
various States bears such a slight proportion to the population,
that manufactures of materials of use only in time of war could
not flourish. Thus it was that at the time of the commencement of
hostilities there was available in the United States equipment for
an army of less than one-fifth the size of that which afterwards
took the field, and patriotism and fidelity were shown as much in
the outfitting of that force, as can be shown in actual battle by
any volunteer or regular officer, whether he be posted in fort or
field, and win glory by brilliant dash, or simply doing his duty
by holding his post.
The ready response to the President's call for volunteers was
sufficient to prove that the people were eager to take up arms and
ready to go to the front. But enthusiasm, patriotism and readiness
never make an army. An army is a great machine, of which each
individual is a part, and there even the militia men of the
various States, who had spent so much time in preparing themselves
for just such a struggle, lacked the one great element without
which no army can hope for success: the capacity to move in
unison. Few of the States had given their men the training which
makes of the simple company or regiment a wheel in the brigade or
division.
In the great camps at Chickamauga, at Camp Alger, at Tampa, and at
San Francisco the task of making an army from men who a month
before had been working in the store, the mill or the field, went
on. This meant long, thorough drilling under competent
instructors. Careful study of the tactics and intelligent
comprehension of the meaning of an order makes the soldier. It is
not possible to imagine anything more difficult than the thorough
training of the arms bearer, and for this task the American seems
better fitted than the men of any other country. In an analysis of
the soldiers of the world an authority would place the American,
combining as he does the blood of nations, at the head of the
list, for the reason that with his finer sensibility, his greater
capacity to think while acting and to act while thinking, all tend
to produce in him that character capable of high and perfect
development in the soldier.
At Chickamauga, under General Wade; at Washington, under General
Graham; at Tampa, under General Shafter; at San Francisco, under
General Merriam, and on the New York and New England coasts under
brigadiers who had served East and West, the raw material was
formed, until at length the perfect soldier was produced, the
soldier of whom it could be said:
"Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die."
ABOUT THE ROUGH RIDERS.
Those who are acquainted with the nature of the service usually
required of cavalry in time of war will not question the
usefulness of the cowboy regiment--rough riders as they are
called--that were raised in the West to take part in the invasion
of Cuba.
The cowboy is a rapidly passing type. Barbed wire, the fencing in
of the range, together with the irrigation and cultivation of
those regions which were once marked as deserts on the maps--have
been responsible for his undoing and he has made what may prove to
be his last stand, as a soldier.
The cowboy regiment was the idea of the assistant secretary of the
navy, Theodore Roosevelt, who had had some experience himself as a
cowboy on his Wyoming ranch and who was an expert in such matters
as branding, rope-throwing, broncho breaking and those other
practices which are peculiar to the "cow-puncher."
Lieutenant-Colonel Roosevelt's regiment, which figures on the army
records as the "1st regiment of rifle rangers," but which the
general public from the first preferred to call "Roosevelt's rough
riders," or more simply still, "Teddy's terrors," was made up
almost entirely of cowboys, with a small sprinkling of society
men, who had both a fondness and an aptitude for horsemanship,
which had found no other outlet than that offered by the hunting
field and the polo ground.
MADE UP ALMOST ENTIRELY OF COWBOYS.
In organization the regiment was not widely different from the
famous Texas Rangers, but the uniform was the same as that of the
cavalrymen of the regular army, slightly modified. Its personnel,
with the exception of the millionaire members--was about the same,
however, as that of the Rangers. It included men from almost every
State in the Union, and they could one and all ride well, and
shoot well, and many of them smelled powder in more than one
Indian war.
While Lieutenant-Colonel Roosevelt took the most active part in
its formation, he did not command the regiment. That
responsibility was delegated to Colonel Wood, who was almost as
well known in the West as Roosevelt was in the East. He entered
the army as a surgeon, but he probably had much more to do with
the making of wounds than their healing.
It is said of him that when he was first assigned for duty to an
Arizona post he arrived at the post one night at 7 o'clock, and
the next morning at 4 was in the field and at work. This was
during the Apache campaign in 1885, and Surgeon Wood soon won for
himself the name of the fighting doctor. He was conspicuous in the
famous Geronimo outbreak, having command at various times of the
infantry and scouts engaged in the chase after that wily savage.
The regiment was armed with the Krag-Jorgensen carbine and
revolvers, without which no cowboy would be complete even in time
of peace. And instead of the regular cavalry sword, which is a
rather unwieldy instrument except in the hands of men trained to
its use, the rough riders adopted the Cuban machete, which even
the inexperienced can use successfully; but it was not intended
that they should be swordsmen; their reliance was on the rifle and
revolver. The machete was carried merely as a possible dependence
should ammunition fail, or a hand-to-hand encounter with the
cavalry of the enemy occur. In the development of this plan of
action it can be seen that Colonel Wood and Lieutenent-Colonel
Roosevelt in the tactics they employed followed closely those used
by the mounted riflemen of the revolution. It was a band of this
sort that after a ride of sixty miles the last day met and utterly
routed the English under Colonel Ferguson.