Here we are, thousands of us, an acting mass rather than an
assemblage of thinking individuals. Indeed, it is not strictly military
to think; implicit and unquestioning obedience is the law. When the
order was finally given on Monday night (September 21st) for the whole
army to fell back on Chattanooga, the writer remarked:
'Well, if we shall not have to go any farther--if we can hold
Chattanooga, we are not defeated;--it is even a victory, and we have won
Chattanooga at the battle of Chickamauga.'
'We want none of your speculations,' retorted our Prussian commander;
'it is a soldier's business to obey, and not to think.'
But, it is hardly natural for an American soldier to execute a movement
without inquiring the wherefore. And if we are marched over mountains,
and down the Lookout at Alpine Pass, within a few miles of Rome; and
then marched back again, up the perilous steep, and northward to
Stevens's Gap, and down again;--why, even common soldiers, without the
evidence of brains which there is, or ought to be, in shoulder straps,
inquire of each other for the strategic value there may be in all this
marching and countermarching, and find it hard to believe that it was
all provided for in the original programme.
But in a still higher sense is the American soldier given to thinking.
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