He answered triumphantly, “You can’t deploy men as skirmishers from column formation”; to which I responded, “Well, I did, and, what is more, if any captain had made any difficulty about it, I would have sent him to the rear.”  My critic was quite correct from the parade ground standpoint.  The prescribed orders at that time were to deploy the column first into a line of squads at correct intervals, and then to give an order which, if my memory serves correctly, ran:  “As skirmishers, by the right and left flanks, at six yards, take intervals, march.”  The order I really gave ran more like this:  “Scatter out to the right there, quick, you! scatter to the left! look alive, look alive!” And they looked alive, and they scattered, and each took advantage of cover, and forward went the line.

Now I do not wish what I have said to be misunderstood.  If ever we have a great war, the bulk of our soldiers will not be men who have had any opportunity to train soul and mind and body so as to meet the iron needs of an actual campaign.  Long continued and faithful drill will alone put these men in shape to begin to do their duty, and failure to recognize this on the part of the average man will mean laziness and folly and not the possession of efficiency.  Moreover, if men have been trained to believe, for instance, that they can “arbitrate questions of vital interest and national honor,” if they have been brought up with flabbiness of moral fiber as well as flabbiness of physique, then there will be need of long and laborious and faithful work to give the needed tone to mind and body.  But if the men have in them the right stuff, it is not so very difficult.

At San Antonio we entrained for Tampa.  In various sociological books by authors of Continental Europe, there are jeremiads as to the way in which service in the great European armies, with their minute and machine-like efficiency and regularity, tends to dwarf the capacity for individual initiative among the officers and men.  There is no such danger for any officer or man of a volunteer organization in America when our country, with playful light-heartedness, has pranced into war without making any preparation for it.  I know no larger or finer field for the display of an advanced individualism than that which opened before us as we went from San Antonio to Tampa, camped there, and embarked on a transport for Cuba.  Nobody ever had any definite information to give us, and whatever information we unearthed on our own account was usually wrong.  Each of us had to show an alert and not overscrupulous self-reliance in order to obtain food for his men, provender for his horses, or transportation of any kind for any object.  One lesson early impressed on me was that if I wanted anything to eat it was wise to carry it with me; and if any new war should arise, I would earnestly advise the men of every volunteer organization always to proceed upon the belief that their supplies will not turn up, and to take every opportunity of getting food for themselves.