Cadet Days. A Story of West Point. King Charles

item of their few belongings; stumbling over one another's heels at first, yet with each succeeding day marching to meals with less constraint and greater appetite; spending long hours of toil and brief minutes of respite; twisting, turning, wrenching, extending, developing every muscle, most of them hitherto unsuspected and unknown; bending double, springing erect, roosting on tiptoe, swaying forward, backward, sideways, every ways; aching in every bone and joint, sore in every limb, yet expected to stick to it through thick and thin, until as days wore on and pains wore off, and all that was sore, stiff, and awkward grew little by little to be supple, easy, and alert. Wondrous indeed is the transformation wrought in two weeks of such drill under such drill-masters. The 1st of July arrived; George Graham and his fivescore plebe comrades had now spent a fortnight under surveillance and discipline strict and unrelenting as that of the days of grim old Frederick the Great, except that it tolerated no touch of the corporal's cane, no act of abuse. Sharp, stern, fiercely critical were the young cadet instructors, but after the first few days of soreness the native elasticity returned to both body and soul, the boys began to take heart again, and a spirit of rivalry to develop between the drill squads.

      To Geordie the hours of soreness of spirit had been few as those of physical suffering. His years of life among the soldiers had prepared him for much that he had to encounter, and pride and pluck sustained him when wearied by the drills or annoyed by the sharp language of his instructors. But with poor Benny Frazier all was different. A pet at home, and the brightest scholar of the high-school of his native city; moreover, the boy officer of the high-school battalion, of whom it was confidently predicted that "He would need no drilling at all at West Point"; "He'd show those cadet fellows a thing or two they never dreamed of" – it was gall and wormwood to his soul to find himself the object of no more consideration at the Point than the greenest "country jake" from Indiana or Dakota; and to Benny's metropolitan mind anything from either Western commonwealth could be nothing but green. What made matters worse for Frazier was the fact that his father and mother had accompanied him to the Point on his arrival, and with pardonable pride, but mistaken zeal, had sought to impress upon the minds of such officers, cadets, and relatives of other plebes as they chanced to meet the story of Benny's manifold excellences as soldier and scholar – oft-told tales of how General This or Professor That had declared him the most accomplished young captain they had ever seen. Then poor Mrs. Frazier, who had pictured for her beloved boy a reception at the hands of the authorities in which gratification, cordiality, and respect should be intermingled, was simply aghast to find that he must take his stand with his fellows at the bottom of the ladder. Luckily for Benny, his parents' stay was limited to three days. Unluckily for Benny, they remained long enough to see him at his first squad drill, side by side with two unmistakably awkward boys, and faring but little better. Such was her grief and indignation that the good lady declared to acquaintances at the hotel that her boy should be drilling that horrid little martinet instead of being drilled by him – and such speeches are sure of repetition. Before Benny was a week older he was known throughout the battalion as "the plebe who had come to drill the corps of cadets," and nothing could have started him worse. One can only conjecture what the fond but unwise mother would have said could she have seen, a fortnight later, that boys who had never drilled at all – had never handled a musket – were grouped in the first squad, and making rapid and soldierly progress, while Benny was still fretting and fuming in the lower one. Yet what was so inexplicable and inexcusable in her eyes was perfectly plain and simple to those acquainted with the facts.

      All over the Union now are military schools and National Guard organizations in which the drill regulations of the regular army are well taught and understood; but, on the other hand, there are many schools and communities in which the strictly business system of instruction insisted upon among all progressive soldiers has been neglected in favor of something showy, catchy, pretty to look at, and utterly useless and unserviceable except for spectacular purposes; and as ill-luck would have it, Benny had been taught all manner of "fancy drill" movements utterly at variance with those he was now to learn; and so, poor boy, the nerves and muscles long schooled in one way of doing things were perpetually tripping him in his efforts to master another – he had to unlearn so much before he could learn even a little. The green boys, on whom he looked with such pity at the start, knowing no wrong methods, were speedily far ahead of him in acquiring the right.

      And so the boy who had entered with the highest hopes and expectations was now low on the soldier list and lowest in his mind. But for his father's hard common-sense, Benny Frazier would have been only too glad to resign and get out of it all and go home, as other disappointed boys have done, and declare West Point a hotbed of narrow prejudice, of outrageous partiality, and unbridled injustice; and Benny's mother would have honestly believed every word of it. Connell, too, was ready to sympathize with Frazier, and confidentially to agree with him that Pops, the youngest of the four room-mates, owed his rise to the first squad entirely to the fact that his father was an officer; but when four more boys were added to the first squad, and Connell was one of them, he changed his views, and decided that only merit governed those matters, after all. He began to pluck up heart, too, for he and Graham were among the first to be marched over to the commissary's to try on the new gray fatigue uniforms, and Mr. Loring's squad all appeared in shell jackets and trousers before Winn and Frazier had cast off their civilian garb.

      By July 1st, however, all were in fatigue dress, and consolidated in half a dozen squads for drill purposes. By this time, too, they could march to and from the mess-hall in stiff but soldierly fashion; and still, hour after hour, the relentless drills went on. Only on Saturday afternoons and on the long, beautiful, peaceful Sundays was there really time and opportunity for rest; and still the new cadets were kept carefully secluded from the old, seeing little or nothing of the battalion, except as, with its quick elastic step and its glistening white uniform, with the brave young faces looking browner every day under their snowy helmets, with drums and fifes playing their lively quicksteps, the little column came marching down the shaded road, and the plebes were drawn up in solid ranks until their future comrades should pass by, and, springing up the mess-hall steps, give room for them to follow.

      Pops wrote his first long letter home the second Sunday after passing the entrance examination, and this is something of what he said:

      "We have lived together now just fourteen days, Frazier and Connell, Winn and I, and are getting along pretty well. Of course we may be scattered as soon as we get in camp, for Winn is tall, and will be put in A or D company. Connell wants to live with his statesman, Mr. Foster, in B. If Frazier and I get into the same company we will tent together, most likely. He asked me to, and said he could fix it. We got our fatigue uniforms Thursday, Connell and I, and were almost the first, too, because of being in Mr. Loring's squad for drill. He is very sharp and severe, and some of our class don't like him a bit; but thus far we get along all right. I'm so pleased to be in the first squad to get rifles I don't mind his manner. Of course it helped a good deal knowing the manual of arms, but they're a heap stricter here. [Pops would drop into frontierisms at times.] If a thumb or finger is a bit out of place, the corporal makes more row about it than Sergeant Feeny would over a recruit's coming out for guard with a dirty kit.

      "I guess Frazier wishes he hadn't been so fresh [more slang, Pops] at first. He was captain in the high-school cadets and head of his class, and rather held over our boys about the drill at first; said he knew it all, and showed his school medals for best-drilled soldier, etc.; but Mr. Loring gave him fits, and put him under Mr. Flint, who drilled me the first few days, and is as ugly and stern as he can be. Frazier tried to make us believe the cadets were drilling him wrong; but when he showed us how they did it where he came from I knew it was he who was wrong; and he's had a lot of trouble, and wanted to resign and quit, but his father wouldn't let him. He's getting on a little better now, and says he'll be all right as soon as we are at our studies in the fall. I guess he will, for he's been clear through algebra and geometry and trigonometry, has been in France two years, and speaks French perfectly, and we all think he's sure to be head of the class, if he doesn't get disgusted; but he does that pretty easy. Connell is slower, but has been well taught in the public schools. Winn is a big, tall fellow from 'Kentuck,' as he calls it – good-natured and jolly. He's been to college, and is nearly twenty; so is Connell; and Frazier is eighteen, but a regular boy. He was awfully disgusted at a trick the old cadets played on him last week; and they got hold of some story about his thinking he ought to be drilling them instead of