It Will Of Course Be Understood That
There Is Nothing In The American Army Answering To Our Colonel Of A
Regiment.
With us the officer so designated holds a nominal command
of high dignity and emolument as a reward for past services.
I have already spoken of my visits to the camps of the other armies
in the field, that of General Halleck, who held his headquarters at
St. Louis, in Missouri, and that of General Buell, who was at
Louisville, in Kentucky. There was also a fourth army under General
Hunter, in Kansas, but I did not make my way as far west as that. I
do not pretend to any military knowledge, and should be foolish to
attempt military criticism; but as far as I could judge by
appearance, I should say that the men in Buell's army were, of the
three, in the best order. They seemed to me to be cleaner than the
others, and, as far as I could learn, were in better health. Want
of discipline and dirt have, no doubt, been the great faults of the
regiments generally, and the latter drawback may probably be
included in the former. These men have not been accustomed to act
under the orders of superiors, and when they entered on the service
hardly recognized the fact that they would have to do so in aught
else than in their actual drill and fighting. It is impossible to
conceive any class of men to whom the necessary discipline of a
soldier would come with more difficulty than to an American citizen.
The whole training of his life has been against it. He has never
known respect for a master, or reverence for men of a higher rank
than himself. He has probably been made to work hard for his wages -
harder than an Englishman works - but he has been his employer's
equal. The language between them has been the language of equals,
and their arrangement as to labor and wages has been a contract
between equals. If he did not work he would not get his money - and
perhaps not if he did. Under these circumstances he has made his
fight with the world; but those circumstances have never taught him
that special deference to a superior, which is the first essential
of a soldier's duty. But probably in no respect would that
difficulty be so severely felt as in all matters appertaining to
personal habits. Here at any rate the man would expect to be still
his own master, acting for himself and independent of all outer
control. Our English Hodge, when taken from the plow to the camp,
would, probably, submit without a murmur to soap and water and a
barber's shears; he would have received none of that education which
would prompt him to rebel against such ordinances; but the American
citizen, who for awhile expects to shake hands with his captain
whenever he sees him, and is astonished when he learns that he must
not offer him drinks, cannot at once be brought to understand that
he is to be treated like a child in the nursery; that he must change
his shirt so often, wash himself at such and such intervals, and go
through a certain process of cleansing his outward garments daily.
I met while traveling a sergeant of a regiment of the American
regulars, and he spoke of the want of discipline among the
volunteers as hopeless.
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