Boys' Book of Famous Soldiers Part 1

Boys' Book of Famous Soldiers.

by J. Walker McSpadden.

PREFACE

So much has been written about the great soldiers of the world, that it is a matter of considerable hardihood to attempt to present another volume on the subject in any sense "new." But the Great War has not only brought to the center of the stage a new group of martial figures--it has also intensified and revivified our interest in those of a bygone day. The springs of history rise far back. We can the better appreciate our leaders of today and their problems, by comparing them with the leaders and problems of yesterday. Waterloo takes on a new aspect when viewed from Vimy Ridge.

The present book includes a round dozen of the great soldiers of yesterday and today. The list is about equally divided among British, French, and American leaders, and is confined to the last two centuries. Each man selected is typical of a particular time and task.

His life story contains a message of definite interest and value.

In telling these stories, however, in the limits of brief chapters, we have carefully abstained from the writing of formal biographies. Such a treatment would have resulted merely in a rehash of time-worn data beginning "He was born," and ending "He died."

The plan of these stories is to give a personal portrait of the man, using the background of his early life--to trace his career up from boyhood through the formative years. Such data serves to explain the great soldier of later years. Every schoolboy knows, for example, what Washington did after he was placed in command of the Colonial Army--but what he did in the earlier years to _deserve_ this high command is a story not so well known. Yet it is both interesting in itself, and serves to humanize its subject. The stately Washington steps down off his pedestal, and shoulders again his surveyor's tripod of boyhood days, while he invites us to take a tramp through the Virginia wilds.

The writing (and, we hope, the reading) of these life stories brings an especial message. We discover that in each instance the famous soldier was not a pet of Fortune, but was selected for his high and arduous task, because of the training received in his formative years. His peculiar gift of leadership was merely an expression of his indomitable will to forge ahead. He exemplified in his life the Boy Scout motto, "Be Prepared."

BOYS' BOOK OF FAMOUS SOLDIERS

WASHINGTON

THE YOUNG SURVEYOR

"Turn your guns around on them! Stop them!"

The command was given in peremptory tones to a demoralized group of soldiers. Not waiting for them to carry out his orders, the young officer who gave them leaped from his horse, and with his own hands turned one of the guns upon the advancing foe.

Had it been the Argonne Forest, and the year 1918, it would have been a machine gun that the officer manned. But the time was over a century and a half earlier than this--and the weapon a light bra.s.s field-piece, which after being fired once, must be painfully reloaded.

Meanwhile, the redskins came on.

The young officer, whose name has come down to history as George Washington, was trying to stem the tide of defeat. It was the fateful day when old General Braddock of the British army received his first and fatal lesson in Indian warfare. Says an old Pennsylvania ranger who was also in the fray:

"I saw Col. Washington spring from his panting horse, and seize a bra.s.s field-piece as if it had been a stick. His look was terrible. He put his right hand on the muzzle, his left hand on the breach; he pulled with this, he pushed with that, and wheeled it round, as if it had been a plaything. It furrowed the ground like a ploughshare. He tore the sheet-lead from the touch-hole; then the powder-monkey rushed up with the fire, when the cannon went off, making the bark fly from the trees, and many an Indian send up his last yell and bite the dust."

Yet this resourceful officer, fighting almost single-handed against certain defeat, was then only a young man a few months past twenty-one.

He was displaying the same qualities which were later to make him the commander-in-chief of a Revolution.

George Washington was a typical example of the born leader. He had received no set military training save that which the stern necessity of frontier life forced upon him. Yet at nineteen we find him no less courageous and active when facing the enemy. He had been reared as a farmer boy, with no other intention at first than the successful management of his father's estates in Virginia. But boys in those days had to learn to handle the rifle as readily as the plow, and Washington was no exception to this rule.

Born in 1732 (every schoolboy knows the month and day) at Bridges Creek, Virginia, his first home was a plain wooden farmhouse of somewhat primitive pattern, with four rooms on the ground floor, and a roomy attic covered by a long, sloping roof. But before he was more than able to walk this house burned down, and the family removed to another farm in what was later Stafford County--an attractive knoll across the Rappahannock River from Fredericksburg.

When George was eleven years old he lost his father, which threw him to a great extent upon his own resources, so far as outdoor life was concerned, although his education was still the care of his mother, who is pictured as a gentlewoman of the old school--one born to command.

To her Washington owed many traits, among them his courtliness. In those days, the gentle-bred boys always used very formal language when addressing their elders. And so we find Washington writing to his mother, even after he became of age, beginning his letter with, "Honored Madam," and ending "Your dutiful son."

After his father's death, George Washington made his home for four or five years with his brother Augustine, who lived at the old homestead, now rebuilt, at Bridges Creek; and near there he attended school. It was in no sense a remarkable school, being kept by a Mr. Williams, but it was thorough in the fundamentals, the "Three R's," without going in much for the frills. Some of Washington's exercise books are still preserved, showing in a good round hand a series of "Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation."

Such things sound somewhat priggish today; but in those days they were a necessary part of one's education. Washington was probably neither better nor worse than the run of Virginia boys, of gentle stock, in those days--just a good-natured, fun-loving youngster, not especially bright as a scholar, but known as a plodder. One of his early playmates was Richard Henry Lee, who also grew up to be a famous Virginian; and between the two some droll schoolboy letters pa.s.sed.

Washington was to be, like his father, a Virginia planter; and this may have had something to do with the sort of education he received, which was not very extensive. But along with his early training for farm life there were many echoes of the military, which must have had a lasting influence on the growing lad. His brother, Lawrence, had been a soldier in His Majesty's service, and his stories of campaign life so fired George's imagination that he was for throwing his books away, at fifteen, and going into the navy. He was too young for the army, but Lawrence, who rather encouraged him, told him that he could get him a berth as midshipman.

It is related that the young middy's luggage was actually on board a British man-of-war anch.o.r.ed in the Potomac, when Madam Washington, who all along had been reluctant to give her consent, now withdrew it altogether; and the "dutiful son" was saved from the navy for a larger arena.

The boy was then just turned fifteen, and seems to have rebelled from the humdrum life of the plantation. He was at the restless age, and his naturally adventurous disposition sought a more active outlet.

This proved to be surveying--a profession then greatly in demand.

There were great tracts of wilderness in Virginia still inhabited by Indians and infested by wild animals, which had never heard the sound of the woodman's axe. These tracts had been included in grants from the King, but their boundaries had never been exactly determined. To make such surveys was a task requiring both skill and courage.

Washington was naturally an exact and painstaking boy. He now applied himself to geometry and trigonometry; and at the ripe age of sixteen was ready to sling his somewhat crude surveyor's instruments across his shoulder and subdue the wilderness. It promised excitement and adventure--and the work was well paid.

Washington was even then a strapping big fellow, tall and muscular, and nearly six feet in height. He afterwards exceeded this height, but at sixteen there were naturally some hollows which remained to be filled out. He is described as having a well-shaped, active figure, symmetrical except for the unusual length of his arms, indicating great strength. His light brown hair was drawn back from a broad forehead, and grayish-blue eyes looked happily and perhaps soberly on the pleasant Virginia hills and valleys. His face was open and manly, set off by a square, ma.s.sive jaw, and a general expression of calmness and strength. "Fair and florid, big and strong, he was, take him for all in all, as fine a specimen of his race as could be found in the English colonies."

It was at this turning point in his career that Washington was fortunate in finding a friend and protector in Lord Fairfax, whose daughter was the wife of Lawrence Washington. This distinguished old veteran, a long-time friend of the Washington family, took a particular fancy to the young man. They hunted the fox together, and hunted him hard. In those days fox-hunting was no kid glove and pink tea affair.

It was one of many perilous outdoor sports that frontier Virginia could afford; and as they hunted, the old English n.o.bleman had opportunity to learn what sort of stuff this young Virginian was made of. He saw that here was a union of st.u.r.dy qualities upon which he could rely.

Lord Fairfax then owned, by kingly grant, a vast estate stretching across the Blue Ridge into the untrodden wilderness. Until the estate was properly surveyed, it would be subject to endless lawsuits. We can imagine the following conversation on one of their helter-skelter rides together:

"What are you studying now, George?"

"Mathematics, sir."

"Humph! Like it?"

"In part--but some of it is stiff."

"What are you going to do with it?"

"Well, sir," hesitated George, "since my mother objects to my going into the navy, I thought I would turn my hand at surveying. There's lots to be done around here."

"The very thing! I think I could use you, myself. When you are ready let me know, and I'll send you over the hill yonder to mark out where Fairfax starts, and where he ends. My cousin George will go with you."

So, in some such fashion it was arranged, and in the spring of 1748, George Fairfax and George Washington set forth on their adventures.

The Virginia mountains were just budding forth in the freshness of spring when they started out by way of Ashby's Gap, in the Blue Ridge, entering the valley of Virginia. Thence they worked through the Shenandoah region, crossing the swollen Potomac and surveying the hilly country of what is now Frederick County.

It was a rough and hazardous trip lasting over a month, but one that left them fit and seasoned woodsmen. They had learned what it was to shift for themselves; to defend themselves against prowling beasts in an untrodden wilderness; to swim swollen currents; to be wet and cold and hungry; to come suddenly upon a war party of Indians, who would not have scrupled to kill them, had the savages known that these two youths were plotting and dividing up the hunting grounds which they claimed as their own.

That all these things were a part of their experience we note from jottings made briefly but methodically by Washington in his diary of the trip. As to the survey itself, a Virginia t.i.tle attorney remarked, many years afterward, that in clearing up old t.i.tles the lines surveyed by Washington were more reliable than any others of their day.

Lord Fairfax was so pleased with its results that he procured for his protege an appointment as public surveyor. It was his induction into three years of hard frontier life, which was the finest possible schooling to him, for his later career as soldier. We find him writing to a friend:

"Since you received my letter of October last, I have not slept above three or four nights in a bed, but after walking a good deal all the day, I have lain down before the fire upon a little hay, straw, fodder, or a bearskin, whichever was to be had, with man, wife, and children, like dogs and cats; and happy is he who gets the berth nearest the fire. Nothing would make it pa.s.s off tolerably but a good reward. A doubloon is my constant gain every day that the weather will permit of my going out, and sometimes six pistoles."

This would indicate that he was a thrifty lad, honestly pleased with honest earnings--and no mere adventurer.

About this time, a company was formed, called the Ohio Company, for the purpose of opening a trade route through northern Virginia and Maryland. George Washington's two elder brothers, Lawrence and Augustine, were interested in the 'enterprise'; and they naturally called in their young surveyor brother to consultation. The project sounded fascinating, but presented many elements of danger. The French were becoming more and more active, and making warlike preparations to seize and hold all the western frontier. In order to develop and hold this land against the French and their Indian allies, it was necessary to place the work in the hands of a military leader.

George Washington was at this time only nineteen years old, but fully grown--a man of powerful physique, hardened and seasoned by his outdoor life. Despite his youth and lack of military experience, the Ohio Company secured for him the appointment of adjutant general of this district. Washington at once placed himself under several military officers of his acquaintance, among them a Major Muse, and soon acquired at least the rudiments of warfare, the manual of arms. The broader school of tactics he was to acquire for himself in the field of experience.