American Rifle - Alexander Rose [115]
Diehards, like such Revolutionary forebears as Alexander Hamilton and Anthony Wayne, were concerned solely with ensuring that men did as they were told by their superiors—a subject of particularly wider import at this later time, when violent industrial unrest, sabotage of rail-road property, and angry strikes were becoming increasingly common.81 Diehard officers were particularly exercised by the prospect that individual soldiers would choose when to advance (or worse, retreat). To them, the so-called new courage was merely old-fashioned cowardice dolled up as virtue. A favorite progressive statistic was that in the Civil War sharpshooting skirmishers had a hit-and-kill rate double that of the infantry regimented into lines for volley firing; diehards retorted that those very same sharpshooters often retreated after suffering a mere two percent loss, while disciplined infantry did not break until sustaining at least a 40 percent casualty rate.82
Then diehards drew attention to the prima-donna reputation of the progressives’ favorite marksmen. Back in the war, critics remembered, sharpshooter units on both sides had been less than ideal. Union ones had, outrageously, been permitted to carry their own choice of rifles and, in homage to their hunting ancestry, had worn green uniforms when they complained about regulation blue ones. Even then, carped an officer who had reviewed them in December 1861, they were “perfect slouches and slovens in appearance [of whom] hardly any two are uniformed alike.”83 As for the Confederate battalions, despite their skills they had been bywords for delinquency and orneriness.
To that end, one Lieutenant Frost argued, the recent rage for target shooting was unconducive to maintaining tight discipline: “In the race for a record, men known to be good shots have been coddled and petted until there was no living with them.” More shockingly still, “men of this class have even set up their will against that of the officer, and too often, it has been overlooked.”84
Intending to break the progressive stranglehold on marksmanship training, diehards counterattacked. Reliance on wind gauges and advanced, elevating sights was ruining the art of soldiering, said Captain James Chester—a man so Old School, he was the school they knocked down to build the Old School—and he proposed to replace them with a simple spirit level. His ally Captain Frank Ely even developed a mechanism that prevented a platoon’s lined-up rifles from being raised (or fired) past the angle set by their officer.85
In Germany a new technique of fire control, called “field fire,” had swept the army, and it quickly gained a following among American diehards.86 According to this method, officers estimated the range to the enemy, and their men followed the command to fire, thereby removing individual riflemanship from the equation and restoring the traditional top-down hierarchy. If the officer made a correct estimate, the enemy received a mighty broadside; if he didn’t, everyone missed and their shots sailed high or low; the key thing was to keep order and strict fire discipline. Essentially, Chester, Ely, and their German equivalents wanted to ensure that weapons were pointed straight forward and leveled; they wanted to force soldiers to get so close to the enemy that marksmanship didn’t matter. That was the old courage, and it still worked.
The progressive-diehard antagonism was reflected in the decades-long clash over the army’s rifle. The .45-70 single-shot Springfield that, after much effort and expense, had been converted after the Civil War from a muzzle-loader into a breech-loader,