The Career of Leonard Wood Part 1

The Career of Leonard Wood.

by Joseph Hamblen Sears.

I

THE SUBJECT

In these days immediately following the Great War it is well upon beginning anything--even a modest biographical sketch--to consider a few elementals and distinguish them from the changing unessentials, to keep a sound basis of sense and not be led into hysteria, to look carefully again at the beams of our house and not be deceived into thinking that the plaster and the wall paper are the supports of the building.

Let us consider a few of these elementals that apply to the subject in hand as well as to the rest of the universe--elemental truths which do not change, which no Great War can alter in the least, which serve as guides at all times and will help at every doubtful point. They range themselves somewhat as follows:

The human being is ent.i.tled to the pursuit of happiness--happiness in the very broadest sense of the word. No one can approach this object {12} unless he is in some way subordinated to something and unless he is responsible for something. No man can get satisfaction out of life unless he is responsible for what he does to some authority higher than himself and unless there is some one or something that looks to him for guidance. Perhaps the existence of religion has much to do with this. Perhaps prayer and all that it means to us belongs in the category of the first of these elementals. Certainly the family is an example of the second.

The family is the unit of civilization--always has been and always will be. The father and the mother have their collective existence, and their children looking to them for guidance, support and growth, both physical and moral. The moment the family begins to exist it becomes a responsibility for its head, and around it centers a large part of the life and happiness of the human being.

In like manner the state is the unit to which we are subordinated.

These const.i.tute two examples of responsibility and subordination which are necessary to the {13} acquirement of civilization, of happiness and of the rewards of life.

Wherever the state has presumed to enter too far into the conduct of the family it has overstepped its bounds and that particular civilization has degenerated. Wherever the family has presumed to give up its subordination to the state and gather unto itself the responsibility through special privilege, that particular state has begun to die.

In modern civilization it is as impossible to conceive of a state without the unit of the family, as it is to consider groups of families without something that we call a state. It is ludicrous to think of a strong and virile nation composed of one hundred million bachelors. We must go back to the feudal days of the middle ages to get a picture of the family without a state.

In other words, a man, to approach happiness, must have his family in support of which it is his privilege to take off his coat and work, and--if fate so decree--live; and he must have his country's flag in honor of which it is his privilege to take off his hat, and--if need be--die.

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Love and patriotism--these are the names of two of the st.u.r.dy beams of the house of civilization.

These old familiar laws have been brought forward again by the outbreak of the Great War. There is a letter in existence written by a young soldier who volunteered at the start, a letter which he wrote to his unborn son as he sat in a front line trench in France. It tells the whole great truth in a line. It says: "My little son, I do not fully realize just why I am fighting here, but I know that one reason is to make sure that _you_ will not have to do it by and by." That lad was responsible for a new family, and was the servant of his state--and he began his approach to the great happiness when he thought of writing that letter.

It will be well for us to remember these simple laws as we proceed.

Fifty-eight years ago these laws and several more like them were just as true as they are now. Fifty-eight years hence they will still be true, as they will be five thousand eight hundred years hence.

Fifty-eight years ago--to be exact, {15} October 9, 1860--there was born up in New Hampshire a man child named Leonard Wood, in the town of Winchester, whence he was transferred at the age of three months to Ma.s.sachusetts and finally at the age of eight years to Poca.s.set on Cape Cod. This man child is still alive at the time of writing, and during his fifty-eight years he has stood for these elemental truths in and out of boyhood, youth and manhood in such a fashion that his story--always interesting--becomes valuable at a time when, the Great War being over, many nations, to say nothing of many individuals, are forgetting, in their admiration of the new plaster and the wall paper, that the beams of the house of civilization are what hold it strong and st.u.r.dy as the ages proceed.

This place, Cape Cod, where the formative years of Leonard Wood's life were pa.s.sed, is a sand bank left by some melting glacier sticking out into the Atlantic in the shape of a doubled-up arm with a clenched fist as if it were ready at any moment to strike out and defend New England against any attack that might come from the eastward. Those who call it their native place have acquired {16} something of its spirit. They have ever been ready to oppose any aggression from the eastward or any other direction, and they have ever been ready to stand firmly upon the conviction that the integrity of the family and of the state must be maintained. And young Wood from them and from his Mayflower Pilgrim ancestors absorbed and was born with a common sense and a directness of vision that have appeared throughout his life under whatever conditions he found himself.

There seems to have been nothing remarkable about him either in his boyhood or in his youth. He achieved nothing out of the ordinary through that whole period. But there has always been in him somewhere, the solid basis of sense and reason which kept him to whatever purpose he set himself to achieve along the lines of the great elemental truths of life and far away from visionary hallucinations of any sort.

If it was Indian fighting, he worked away at the basis of the question and got ready and then carried out. If it was war, the same. If it was administration, he {17} studied the essentials, prepared for them, and then carried them out.

Like all great achievements, it is simplicity itself and can be told in words of one syllable. In all lines of his extraordinarily varied career extending over all the corners of the globe he respected and built up authority of government and protected and encouraged the development of the family unit. One might say "Why not? Of course."

The answer is "Who in this country in the last thirty years has done it to anything like the same extent?"

Many minds during this time have advanced new ideas; many men have invented amazing things; many able people have opened up new avenues of thought and vision to the imagination of the world, sometimes to good and lasting purpose, sometimes otherwise. But who has taken whatever problem was presented to him and invariably, no matter what quality was required, brought that problem to a successful conclusion without upheaval, or chaos, or even much excitement for any one outside the immediately interested group?

It is not genius; it is organization. It is not {18} the flare of inventive ability; it is the high vision of one whose code rested always on elemental, sound and enduring principles and who has not swerved from these to admire the plaster and the paper on the wall. It is finally the great quality that makes a man keep his feet on the ground and his heart amongst the bright stars.

Of such stuff are the men of this world made whom people lean on, whom people naturally look to in emergency, who guide instinctively and unerringly, carrying always the faith of those about them because they deal with sound things, elemental truths and sane methods--because they give mankind what Leonard Wood's greatest friend called "a square deal."

It is difficult to treat much of his youth because he is still living and the family life of any man is his own and not the public's business. But there is a certain interest attaching to his life-work for his country in knowing that his great-great-grandfather commanded a regiment in the Revolutionary army at Bunker Hill and that his father was a doctor who served in the Union army during the Civil War.

Out of such heredity has {19} come a doctor who is a Major General in the United States Army.

At the same time his own life on Cape Cod outside of school at the Middleboro Academy was marked by what might distinguish any youngster of that day and place--a strong liking for small boating, for games out of doors, for riding, shooting and fishing. These came from a fine healthy body which to this day at his present age is amazing in its capacity to carry him through physical work. He can to-day ride a hundred miles at a stretch and walk thirty miles in any twenty-four hours.

Later in life this was one of the many points of common interest that drew him and Theodore Roosevelt so closely together. It has no particular significance other than to make it possible for him in many lands at many different limes to do that one great thing which makes men leaders--to show his men the way, to do himself whatever he asked others to do, never to give an order whether to a military, sanitary, medical or administrative force that he could not and did not do himself in so far as one man could do it.

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There was little or no money in the Wood family and the young man had to plan early to look out for himself. He wanted to go to sea--probably because he lived on Cape Cod and came from a long line of New Englanders. He wanted to go into the Navy. He even planned to join an Arctic expedition at the age of twenty and began to collect material for his outfit. But finally, following his father's lead, he settled upon the study of medicine.

This led to the Harvard University Medical School and to his graduation in 1884. There then followed the regular internship of a young physician and the beginning of practice in Boston.

Then came the change that separated Wood from the usual lot of well educated, well prepared doctors who come out of a fine medical school and begin their lifework of following their profession and building up a practice, a record, a family and the history which is the highest ideal man can have and the collective result of which is a sound nation.

Wood wanted action. He wanted to do {21} something. He had a strong inclination to the out-of-doors. And it is probably this, together with his inheritance and the chances of the moment, that led him to enter the army as a surgeon. As there was no immediate vacancy in the medical corps he took the job of contract surgeon at a salary of $100 a month and was first ordered to duty at Fort Warren in Boston Harbor where he stayed only a few days. His request for "action" was granted in June, 1885, and he wais ordered to Arizona to report to General Crook on the Mexican border near Fort Huachuca.

And here begins the career of Leonard Wood.

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THE INDIAN FIGHTER

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II

THE INDIAN FIGHTER

The problem was what turned out to be the last of the Indian fighting, involving a long-drawn-out campaign. For over a hundred years, as every one knows, the unequal struggle of two races for this continent had been in progress and the history of it is the ever tragic story of the survival of the fittest. No one can read it without regret at the destruction, the extermination, of a race. No one, however, can for a moment hesitate in his judgment of the inevitableness of it, since it is and always will be the truth that the man or the race or the nation which cannot keep up with the times must go under--and should go under. Education, brains, genius, organization, ability, imagination, vision--whatever it may be called or by how many names--will forever destroy and push out ignorance, incompetence, stupidity.

The Indians were not able--tragic as the truth {26} is--to move onward, and so they had to move out and give place to the more worthy tenant.

The end of this century of struggle was the campaign against the Apaches in the Southwest along the Mexican border, where they made their last stand under their able leader Geronimo.

The young doctor was detailed at once for duty on a broiling fourth of July under Captain--afterwards General--Henry W. Lawton, and the next day he rode a horse over thirty-five miles. That incident to the initiated is noteworthy, but even more so is the fact that shortly afterwards in a hard drive of five succeeding days he averaged eighteen hours a day either in the saddle or on foot, leading the horses. It was a stiff test. To make it worse he was given the one una.s.signed horse--that is to say, a horse that was known as an "outlaw"--whose jerky gait made each saddle-sore complain at every step. The sun beat down fiercely; but, burned and blistered fore and aft, Leonard Wood could still smile and ask for more action.

The stoicism of the tenderfoot who had come to play their game was not lost on the troopers {27} with whom he was to spend the next two years fighting Indians. He "healed in the saddle" at once and a few weeks later was out-riding and out-marching the best of Captain Lawton's command, all of whom were old and experienced Indian fighters.

This was not to be the last time that Leonard Wood was to find himself faced at the outset by tacit suspicion and lack of confidence on the part of the men he was to command. Years later in the Philippines he was put up against a similar hostility, with responsibilities a thousandfold more grave, and in the same dogged way he won confidence--unquestioning loyalty--by proving that he was better than the best. "Do it and don't talk about it," was his formula for success. It was this quality in him that made it possible for Captain Lawton to write to General Nelson A. Miles, who had then succeeded General Crook, after the successful Geronimo campaign: "... I can only repeat that I have before reported officially and what I have said to you: that his services during the trying campaign were of the highest order. I speak particularly of services {28} other than those devolving upon him as a medical officer; services as a combatant or line officer voluntarily performed. He sought the most difficult work, and by his determination and courage rendered a successful issue of the campaign possible."

General Crook, who commanded the troops along the border, characterized the Apaches as "tigers of the human race." Tigers they were, led by Geronimo, the man whose name became a by-word for savagery and cruelty. For a time these Indians had remained subdued and quiet upon a reservation, and there can be no question but what the subsequent outbreaks that led to the long campaign in which Wood took part were due largely to the lack of judgment displayed by the officials in whose charge they were placed. Both the American settlers and the Mexicans opposed the location of the Indians on the San Carlos reservation and lost no opportunity to show their hostility. When General Crook took command of that district he found he had to deal with a mean, sullen and treacherous band of savages.