wrong regularly, as if no one of ability was
anywhere about. As a matter of fact, however, the organizing and
shipping of a suddenly acquired expeditionary volunteer force has
never been accomplished in any other way. The truth {90} of the matter
is that it can never be run properly at the start for the simple
reason that there is no organization fitted to carry out the details.

The officials in Washington who had to do with the army--good men in
many cases, poor men in some cases--if they had been in office long
had been handling a few hundred men here and there in the forts, on
the plains, or at the regular military posts. They could no more be
molded into a homogeneous whole than could the cowboys, stockbrokers,
college athletes, and southern planters maneuver until they had been
drilled.

To Colonel Wood, busy most of the hours of the day and night trying to
get order out of chaos in his small part of the great rush, the whole
episode was a graphic demonstration of the need of getting ready. Many
years later a much-advertised politician of our land said that an army
was not necessary since immediately upon the need for defense of our
country a million farmers would leave their plows and leap to arms. To
an officer trying to find a transport train in the middle of the night
with a thousand hungry, tired, half-trained men under him such logic
aught well have {91} caused a smile, if nothing worse. Leave his plow
at such a call the American Citizen will--and by the millions, if need
be. He has done just that in the last two years. He will leap to
arms--to continue the rhetoric--but what can he do if he finds no
arms, or if they do not exist and cannot be made for nine months?

But the thing was not new to Wood even in those days. As he talks of
that period now he says that it was not so bad. There was food, rough,
but still food, and enough. There were transports. It only needed that
they be found. If you could not get uniforms of blue, take uniforms of
tan. If you could not find sabers, go somewhere, in or out of the
country, and buy them or requisition them and put in the charge later.

Yet, even so, no man in such a position, going through what he went
through, worrying hour by hour, could fail to see the object lesson
and take the first opportunity when peace was declared to begin to
preach the necessity for getting ready for the next occasion. And it
was largely due to Leonard Wood, as the world well knows, tha