American Rifle - Alexander Rose [111]
In the ranks below them the situation was still worse. Men who enlisted were commonly regarded, in the words of the New York Sun, as “bummers, loafers, and foreign paupers.” In fact, of the 7,734 enlistees in 1882, about a third described themselves as laborers, and nearly ten percent as farmers. The remainder tended to be bakers, blacksmiths, teamsters, and clerks, and most were in their midtwenties.
There were also quite a few exceptions, such as the Harvard man serving in C Troop of the Eighth Cavalry, the exiled Russian aristocrat doing a fine job as a sergeant of the First Cavalry, and the former divinity student who as a well-read private in the Third Cavalry subscribed to the New York Times, the New York Herald, the Kansas City Times, the St. Louis Globe Gazette, the Police Gazette, and the New York Clipper.56 Indeed, among the hundred men in his company, said a trumpeter of the Seventh Cavalry in 1877, there was a printer, a telegraph operator, a doctor, two lawyers, three professors of languages, a harness maker, and three schoolteachers.57
In short, thought Corporal Emil Bode (whose drill sergeant was Jewish and who himself was acquainted with Lieutenant Henry Flipper, the first black graduate of the United States Military Academy), the army really was made up of all sorts. “We found men of intellect and stupidity, sons of congressmen and sons of farmers, rich and poor, men who are willing to work and can not find it in civil life, men who are looking for work and hope that they never may find any: gamblers, thieves, cutthroats, drunkards”—and that was just among the officers, Bode laughed. As for the recruits, “Oh what a variety of humanity, from a very intelligent society man, to Darwin’s missing link [from] some backwoods” to “a real Yankee” who had “read too many dime novels, poor boy, and wanted to go west to kill Injuns, and wished he’d never left home.”58
Given the appalling conditions, the frequency of bullying, the prevalence of homesickness, and the risks soldiers ran for only a few dollars a day, disheartened officers found it almost impossible to keep their companies’ numbers up. Desertion was rife. Of the 255,712 men recruited between 1867 and 1891, fully 88,475—a third—went AWOL, many absconding with their rifles and equipment, to sell to whoever offered a price, be he brigand or Indian. In some units turnover was so high that one officer remembered drilling with a company consisting of four men.59
Sometimes, lured by offers of amnesty or because they had nowhere else to go, deserters came back to the army and took their chances with a new alias. Captain King recalled hearing a working-class New Yorker, sounding for all the world like he’d stepped out of a moonlight-and-magnolia southern romance novel, announce that he was “Jackson Bewregard,” while a hulking Scotsman with an incomprehensible accent claimed he was christened “Jooles Vern.” Playing along, the recruitment adjutant exclaimed, “ ‘No. 173—Jules Verne.’ Ha! Yes. The party that wrote Around the World in Eighty Days. Have we any more of these eminent Frenchmen, sergeant?”60
With army morale alternating between low and very low, heavy drinking was the force’s bane. When the idealistic young West Pointer George Duncan arrived at his first posting at Fort Wingate, New Mexico, in 1886, he found every man, from the commanding officer down to the freshest