Army of the West

“ Not every sort of man who could hold a plow or wield a hoe would do: Chinese coolies, for example, would hardly be considered desirable, even with all their capacity for hard work, persistence, and patience. Furthermore, it is plain now, that the West could not have looked to the Eastern States alone to send out an industrial army sufficient in numbers and spirit for the conquest of the new empire and the extraction of its varied resources at the desired speed. ”

“ The West saw only the men of action, the giants who did the bidding of the fathers of the dream, the surveyors, plate-layers, navvies, engineers. These men of action were organized like an army. Like an army, they had their officers, their N.C.O.s, their rank and file, their hangers-on and camp-followers. ”

“ Well, to speak plainly, there is no part of the Army of the West, whether in its military or administrative departments, which does not need the hand of a martinet. The battalions have no sort of cohesion. The old muster-rolls are reduced to a hundred and fifty men. ”

“ Imagine the plight of the Russian army when it arrived before our entrenched camp at Candahar, connected, as it would be, by railway [Pg 311] with our immense resources in India. The Russian army would find itself in a country stripped of supplies and carriage, with a powerful enemy in its front, and fanatical tribes waging a guerilla war on its flanks and rear.' [111] Sir West Ridgeway also bore testimony to the beneficial rule of Russia in Central Asia, and that her officers on the frontier were conciliatory, moderate gentlemen. ”

“ THE WEST RIDING TROOPS
The civilian effort before the war to create a ‘people’s army’ under the provisions of the Territorial Force Act, was a fine national exploit, whether in the West Riding or elsewhere. Equally fine, if not finer, though no basis of comparison can be fixed, was the response of the men, including officers and other ranks, to whom the appeal was made. ”

“ The Indian army, reorganised after the Mutiny, displayed all its old qualities of loyalty and gallantry in the course of the numerous foreign expeditions in which it was employed in co-operation with the British army, in Egypt and the Sudan, in Afghanistan, China, and Tibet, in addition to the chronic frontier fighting on the turbulent North-West border. ”

“ The combined French, Belgian and British Armies in the West and the Russian Army in the East are opposed to the united forces of Germany and Austria acting as a combined Army between us.
"Our enemies elected at the outset of the war to throw the weight of their forces against the Armies in the West, and to detach only a comparatively weak force, composed of very few first-line troops and several Corps of the second and third line, to stem the Russian advance until the Western forces would be completely defeated and overwhelmed. ”

“ There was little of leading value in the arts and industries of the West which had not been introduced into this island empire, the equipment of her army vied with that of the most advanced powers, her navy possessed a number of the most powerful type of steel-clad battle-ships, she had been admitted into the family of the great nations by a compact on equal terms with Great Britain, and she had become adapted to cope with powers vastly more capable in the arts of [Pg 352] war than China, to deal, indeed, with one of the greatest and much the most populous of European nations. ”

“ Instead of proceeding to the west of Paris they swung round steadily to the southeast in order to keep their armies away from the enveloping movement of the French and English and drive their famous wedge-like formation southward for the purpose of dividing the allied forces of the west from the French Army of the East. ”

“ So the war-clouds again burst, with, on one side, a British, Dutch, and Austrian army under Marlborough and Prince Eugene, and a force of Spanish, Bavarians, and French under Tallard on the other; but the extension of the interest in foreign political war was not now confined only to the Continent, for seven regiments of infantry were also despatched to the West Indies, to attempt the capture of the enemy’s possessions in the Caribbean Sea and elsewhere. ”

“ Would Ypres fall? Would the Channel ports follow, with all their accumulated stores, and G.H.Q. be driven to the sea? Could the hard-pressed Troops of the Second Army hold out to perform their allotted task, since ‘the constant and severe fighting in the Lys battle front, following so closely on the tremendous struggle South of Arras, had placed a very serious strain upon the British forces’? ”

“ In the early eighties one might stand by the lakeside and be very conscious of a West beyond that was still in a pioneer stage. At the department headquarters of the army might be met hardy campaigners against the Indians of mountain and plain who were still a little apprehensive that the telegraph might demand orders for the movement of troops against hostile red men along the vanishing frontiers. ”

“ We rule only; we neither absorb nor are absorbed. The Russians do the former, and therein lies their strength. They are by origin Asiatics, and in going back to their birthplace, they retain the power England can never have. As barbaric hordes they invaded Eastern Europe. Checked there by the higher civilisation of the West, they have learned to impose on their natural Asiatic savagery the Western veneer. “Scratch the Russian and you find the Tartar, the Central Asian, beneath.” ”

“ It is an American tradition that a standing army is a standing menace to liberty; in Jefferson's presidency the army was reduced to 3,000 men. It is American tradition that we keep out of the affairs of other nations. It is American practice that we meddle with the affairs of everybody else from the West to the East Indies, from Russia to Japan; and to do it we have a standing army of 83,251 men. ”

“ They were quite different to professional soldiers, who are kept and paid through years of peace for this particular purpose of war; who spend their lives practising their profession and gaining promotion and distinction; and who, [31] on being confronted with the enemy, fulfil the great ambition of their lives.
‘Equally distinct were the Territorials also from what has been called the New Army, whose Officers and men had ample time to prepare themselves for what they were required to do. ”

“ Meanwhile, for historical purposes, it is essential to remember that, during this period of preparation, the Territorial Force was the Associations. It depended on them for recruits, premises, ranges, arms, equipment, clothing (even to ‘boots other than lace-up for wear by mounted men with overalls when walking out’) , everything that makes an Army ”

“ The infantry is the most mobile of any division of the army. Men can go where horses and guns find it impossible. They can file silently through narrow passes or a maze of forest trees and underbrush. They can scale cliffs. They can dodge shell-holes and negotiate muddy roads and morasses. They can move slowly or quickly at will and can therefore take difficult positions where it is impossible quickly to bring up artillery support.
The Ohio boys were in the line exposed to the merciless and cruel machine-gun and artillery fire of the enemy. ”

“ As an officer of the army, the profession of Arthur was not unfavorable to the main purpose he avowed: the process he conducted was, of necessity, harsh and imperative. In the selection of instruments, he preferred military men: they were without colonial scruples, and when the government was unconcerned, perhaps, without partiality. They were deficient in legal knowledge, and as magistrates sometimes overlooked the material facts; but they despised the reproaches of the press, and the censures of civilians. ”

“ No army ever departed from their homes less agitated by the uncertainties of the future; and notwithstanding the dreary picture of the service, drawn by the colonel commanding, there was no danger that a bridge of Lodi, or a plain of Waterloo, would be found in the campaign. Some went out with the keenness of sportsmen who might at least catch a kangaroo: others were contented to live moderately well at government charge. The clerks, released from their offices, gladly embraced a holiday: the poor prisoner acted and felt as a free man, and rejoiced in the interval of his servitude ”

“ The gold-banded képi was tarnished, and it sat on the warrior’s hair at an angle more becoming to a recruit of the class of ’19 than to the man who had burst his way through the Bulgarian army in that wild ride to Nish which marked the beginning of the end of Armageddon.
The banker, though he knew something of the man’s history, found himself wondering at his youthfulness. Most generals, even after nearly five years of warfare, were elderly men, but this fellow looked as much like a petulant boy as anything. ”

“ It was in Baccarat that I met West again, running his car, transporting newspapers or moving-picture [13] machines, or canteen supplies, or itinerant entertainers such as I, out over any sort of road toward the front line. His glimpses of the great war were from an angle of vision that makes what he has to say in this book well worth reading. His duties took him into every sort of billet, and brought him into close touch with many branches of the army, as well as with all sorts of welfare work and workers. ”

“ I travelled through the Northwest considerably during the winter of 1860-1. We had customers in all the little towns in south-west Wisconsin, south-east Minnesota and north-east Iowa. These generally knew I had been a captain in the regular army and had served through the Mexican war. Consequently wherever I stopped at night, some of the people would come to the public-house where I was, and sit till a late hour discussing the probabilities of the future. ”

“ In the heat of the chase when the Hun is the hare, they can forget for a time that they are hungry, but the field kitchen testifies to the fact that hunger undermines courage and that an efficient army must be a well-fed army.
To see men curled up in muddy [73] shell-holes with the sky for canopy, peacefully sleeping, while cannon are booming on every side and shells whining overhead, is sufficient evidence that sleep is not a myth invented by the Gods of Rest. ”

“ And because the Western soldier was more used to the handling of arms, and for the reason that the hardships and varied experience of frontier life had produced in him a ready adaptability to necessities, he was perhaps a little more distinctively American in the quick resourcefulness, in the rough and rugged requirements of war, than was her more delicately reared Eastern brother. ”

“ We worked our way in and out past ammunition wagons, Red Cross ambulances, officers' cars, and army trucks. Just before midnight we reached our huts at Avoncourt, where hot chocolate was being served to never-ending lines of tin-helmeted, khaki-clad wearers of the gas mask.
Through this town, now leveled to the ground by four years of intermittent bombardment, we groped our way to a temporary "Y" supply hut, where we hoped to spend the night. Upon opening the door we discovered that every [70] available foot of space on the bare ground floor was occupied by "Y" men rolled up in their blankets. ”

“ Besides these there are the great piles of garments of wool and rubber and leather, and the wasting stores of army blankets and cots and surgical supplies.
Into the larger salvage piles will go the multitude of tents and temporary wooden barracks for the housing of the fighters from all nations, who for four dreadful years held that "far-flung battle line."
A part of this larger salvage pile will be the temporary hospitals. In less than a year America alone built and [109] equipped hospitals which were capable of accommodating a million wounded. ”

“ They deserve notice less for their own sakes than as examples of the way the West was won; for the land was really conquered not so much by the actual shock of battle between bodies of soldiers, as by the continuous westward movement of the armed settlers and the unceasing individual warfare waged between them and their red foes. ”

“ It was the old, old story of many a pioneer and settler, worn so threadbare at the campfires of the cavalry that rough troopers wondered why it was that white men dared so much to win so little. Yet, through just such hardships, loneliness and peril our West was won, and they who own it now have little thought for those who gave it them. ”

“ But after negotiations shall have failed; after a powerful, ambitious nation shall have taken possession of the key of their Western country and fortified it; after the garrisons are filled by the veterans who have conquered the East: will you have it in your power to waken the generous spirit of the West and dispossess them? ”

“ Let us not forget, either, in our farewell compliments, and our wishes for a safe return, those of our Allies who have been represented here by the Missions—Americans, Italians, and Belgians. It is more than desirable, it is necessary, that the great union of the West should outlast the war. ”

“ If, on the other hand, the North should be obliged to abandon her project of forcing the carcase of the South back into the Union by the sword, she will suddenly find herself with a large army on her hands, with a ruined exchequer, and an immense fund of mortified ambition and angry passion to discount. ”

“ From the Southeastern corner of Europe to the eastern coast of Asia, is a long stretch round the globe, but here, when the scene of war was transferred from Russia to China, we find the same gallant officer among the foremost in the storming of the Taku forts, and with the combined French and English army that fought its way to Peking. ”