American Rifle - Alexander Rose [112]
Partly caused by the tedium of garrison life, alcohol and drug abuse pervaded the officer corps as a whole. Colonel Ranald Mackenzie of the Fourth Cavalry ended up, in the words of Corporal Emil Bode, “in Washington, D.C., in an asylum, crazed from drink.” His colleague, Lieutenant Colonel John Davidson of the Tenth Cavalry, became an opium and morphine addict.63
More alarmingly, a significant number of junior and middle-ranking officers, no longer satisfied with the bottle, relieved their boredom and frustration by intoxicating themselves on battle—or rather, the thought of it. By the 1880s, the backlash to the backlash against war had well and truly set in, for at that time the first of a slew of hugely popular battle reminiscences appeared. Carlton McCarthy, a former Confederate, published Detailed Minutiae of a Soldier’s Life in 1882, celebrating his “joy at the prospect” of fighting the Yankee enemy. General Ulysses Grant’s mammoth autobiography appeared in 1885–86, at the same time as the Century magazine began publishing its realistic series “The Battles and Leaders of the Civil War,” the editor of which claimed he was “telling it like it was.” By such means the gory episodes in any soldier’s life, the ones most often suppressed by veterans, slowly transformed into romantic imaginings by their younger successors.
The Union veteran Colonel B. F. Scribner, in his How Soldiers Were Made, full-throatedly sang war’s praises when he claimed that “there is nothing that produces upon a man so profound an impression as a great battle; nothing which so stirs and tests the soul within him; which so expands and strains the functions of sensation and so awakens all the possibilities of nature! There is nothing which so lifts him out of himself; so exalts him to the regions of heroism and self-sacrifice; nothing which so surcharges him and permeates his receptive faculties, and so employs all the powers of his mind and body as a great battle!”64 In similar vein the jurist and wounded Civil War veteran Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., declared in a speech called “The Soldier’s Faith” that those who “shared the incommunicable experience of war” have felt, and still feel, “the passion of life to its top.” While others may have asked what war was good for, Holmes was adamant that it was good for many things.65
Postwar officers of like mind—called “diehards,” to distinguish them from military progressives like William Church and other accuracy advocates—believed that easterners had abandoned them, and they exhibited an unexpected empathy with and respect for their Indian protagonists. (This sentiment was not confined to officers. When Buffalo Bill Cody exhibited in New England the splendid war bonnet, shield, and weapons of his slain opponent, the heroic young chieftain Yellow Hair, the local press and clergy—much to his disgust—forced him to withdraw “the blood-stained trophies of his murderous and cowardly deeds.” Bill had experienced no problem whatsoever in the West. Even the Indians there thought the exhibition was a signal mark of respect, with one warrior commemorating another’s deeds.)66
Diehards not only expressed sympathy for the Indians’ plight but romanticized their willingness to war to the death.67 General Charles King lost himself in reverie for the “grand revel in blood, scalps, and trophies” that characterized western fighting, a zone where “the love of rapine and warfare is the ruling passion.”68 To men like him, war was glorious, and the bloodier the better. (“When at war, it was kill them all,” fondly recalled George Whittaker of the Sixth Cavalry.)69 Like medieval barons, with armor clanking and banners unfurled, such soldiers