The Career of Leonard Wood Part 12

Here it is:

"I will not say good-by, but consider it a temporary separation--at least I hope so. I have worked hard with you and you have done excellent work. I had hoped very much to take you over to the other side. In fact, I had no intimation, direct or indirect, of any change of orders until we reached here the other night. The orders have been changed and I am to go back to Funston. I leave for that place to-morrow {247} morning. I wish you the best of luck and ask you to keep up the high standard of conduct and work you have maintained in the past. There is nothing to be said. These orders stand; and the only thing to do is to do the best we can--all of us--to win the war.

That is what we are here for. That is what you have been trained for.

I shall follow your career with the deepest interest--with just as much interest as if I were with you. Good luck; and G.o.d bless you!"

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[Ill.u.s.tration]

STATE Of KANSAS

GOVERNOR'S OFFICE

KNOW ALL MEN BY THESE PRESENTS:

INASMUCH as the life of a state, its strength and virtue and moral worth are directly dependent upon the character of the citizens who compose it, and

INASMUCH as it is a solemn obligation imposed upon the Governor of the state to promote and advance the interests and well-being of the commonwealth in every way consistent with due regard for the rights and privileges of sister states, and

WHEREAS, the soldier, Leonard Wood, Major General in the United States Army and now commandant at Camp Funston, has shown by his daily life, by his devotion to duty, by his high ideals and by his love of country, that he is a high-minded man after our own hearths, four-square to all the world, one good to know,

NOW, THEREFORE, I Arthur Capper, Governor of the State of Kansas, do hereby declare the said

MAJOR GENERAL LEONARD WOOD

to be, in character and in ideals, a true Kansan. And by virtue of the esteem and affection the people of Kansas bear him, I do furthermore declare him to be to all intents and purposes a citizen of this state, and as such to be ent.i.tled to speak the Kansas language, to follow Kansas customs and to be known as

CITIZEN EXTRAORDINARY

IN WITNESS WHEREOF I have hereunto subscribed my name and caused to be affixed the Great Seal of the State of Kansas. Done at Topeka, the capitol, this 19th day of December, D. 1919

Arthur Capper GOVERNOR

[Seal of the State of Kansas] By the Governor

[Signature] Secretary of State

[Signature] a.s.st. Secretary of State

[End ill.u.s.tration]

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A few days later Wood had returned to Funston and begun preparations for the training of the 10th Division, when by executive action the Governor of Kansas acknowledged on his own behalf and on behalf of the State the General's services to his country by making him a "citizen extraordinary" of the State.

The story of the Tenth Division is short but illuminating. It was composed princ.i.p.ally of drafted men. Its first groups began to organize at Funston on the 10th of August--raw men from office, farm and shop. They found there the skeletons of so-called regular regiments--regiments which were regular only in name; that is to {250} say, there were only a very few regular officers of experience and a limited number of men recently recruited under the old system. On the 24th General Wood reviewed the whole division. On November 1st it was ready, trained, equipped and in condition both from the physical and the military point of view to go abroad. And when the armistice was signed on November 11th an advance contingent had already gone to France to prepare for its reception. About the middle of September the British and French Senior Mission--three officers of each army--reported at Funston and remained there for six weeks. And upon their departure on November 1st after a long, rigid and critical examination of the division they stated that in their opinion it was by far the best prepared and trained division that they had seen in this country.

Here again appears the same quality that made McKinley appoint Wood Governor-General of Cuba; that made Roosevelt send him to organize the apparently unorganizable part of the Philippine Islands; that caused the French to award him a very high order of the Legion of Honor; {251} that made the State of Kansas take him into its family as a citizen; that led the generals of Europe to hope he would come and be one of them; and finally that caused many hundreds of thousands of his own countrymen to follow him and support him in his plans to prepare the people of his nation for what eventually came upon them.

With the signing of the armistice and the victorious ending of the war Wood's activities did not cease. With characteristic energy he began the work of looking out for the soldiers who would soon be demobilized from the army and thrown upon their own resources. He saw how changed the outlook of many of these men would be. He saw the troubles in which thousands--actually millions--of them would be involved, not through any fault of their own, not through any fault of the Government or of army life, but because they had undergone certain mental changes incident to training, to active service, and hence could not again return to the point they had reached when their military service began.

He, therefore, inst.i.tuted in Chicago, where as Commander of the Central Department he had his {252} headquarters, as well as in St.

Louis, Kansas City and Cleveland, organizations to look to the finding of employment for returning officers and men. And in addresses and all methods open to him he urged the organization of similar bodies in all cities to accomplish elsewhere the same object. His att.i.tude was that of the father of children--the rearrangement on new lines of the American family; and he again found universal support.

"Appreciation of the work done by our Soldiers, Sailors and Marines in the Great War can best be shown by active measures to return them to suitable civil employment upon their discharge from service. The four million men inducted into the service, less the dead, are being returned to their homes. In seeing that they are returned to suitable civil employment, and by that I mean employment in which they will find contentment, we will find it at times difficult to deal with them. We must remember that many of these men, before going in for the great adventure, had never been far from home, had never seen the big things of life, had never had the opportunity of finding {253} themselves. During their service in the army they found out that all men were equal except as distinguished one from the other by such characteristics as physique, education and character. They discovered that men who are loyal, attentive to duty, always striving to do more than required, stood out among their fellows and were marked for promotion. Naturally many of them now see that their former employment will not give them the opportunities for advancement which they have come to prize, and for that reason they want a change. They want a kind of employment which offers opportunities for promotion. Many such men are fitted for forms of employment which offer this advantage, and they must be given the opportunity to try to make good in the lines of endeavor which they elect to follow. It is not charity to give these men the opportunities for which they strive. It is Justice. Others are not mentally equipped to take advantage of such opportunities if offered, and with these we will find it more difficult to deal. They must be reasoned with and directed, if possible, into the kind of employment best suited to their characteristics. Let us {254} remember that a square deal for our honorably discharged Soldiers, Sailors and Marines will strengthen the morale of the Nation and will help to create a sound national consciousness ready to act promptly in support of Truth, Justice and Right" [Footnote: _Address of Leonard Wood_.]

There is, with the differences patent because of time and place and surrounding circ.u.mstances, a flavor to this plea that recalls another address upon a similar subject more than fifty years ago:

"It is for the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so n.o.bly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain--that this nation under G.o.d shall have a new birth of freedom--and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth." [Footnote: _Lincoln's Gettysburg Speech_.]

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THE RESULT

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X

THE RESULT

In these days, therefore, immediately following the Great War it is well to keep in our own minds and try to put into the minds of others the great elemental truths of life; and to try at the same time to keep out of our and their minds in so far as possible the unessential and changing superficialities which never last long and which never move forward the civilization of the human race.

This very simple biographical sketch is not an attempt to settle the problems of the hour. Such an attempt might excite the amus.e.m.e.nt and interest of students of that mental disease known as paranoia--students who are far too busy at the moment as it is without this addition to the unusually large supply of patients--but it could not add anything either to the pleasure or entertainment of any one else. That the simple biographical sketch can even approach the latter {258} accomplishment may be held to be a matter for reasonable doubt.

Nor, furthermore, is the sketch an attempt at the soap box or other variety of philosophy which one individual attempts to thrust down the mental throats of his fellow beings. There exists a hazy suspicion that the fellow beings are quite competent to decide what they will swallow mentally and what they will, vulgarly speaking, expectorate forthwith.

The simple biographical sketch is a frank attempt to express, as at least one person sees it, the character, the accomplishments and the service rendered by one man to his country throughout a life which seems to have been singularly st.u.r.dy, honest, normal and consistent, and which, therefore, is an example to his countrymen that may in these somewhat hectic times well be considered and perhaps even emulated.

At the risk, however, of entering the paranoiac's clinic it would seem almost necessary if not even desirable to apply the record discussed to the situation which confronts us in these days, since biography has no special significance unless it {259} brings to others some more or less effective stimulus to better and greater endeavor on their own part.

If, therefore, the life and record of a man like Leonard Wood is to be of value to others it must to some extent at least be considered in relation to the events of his day and time. These events have been sufficiently startling in the light of all previous history to make it perhaps permissible to glance over them.

Roughly speaking, since Wood was born transportation has become so perfected that, in the light of our navy's recent accomplishments with the seaplane, it is now possible for a human being to go from New York to London in the same period of time that it took then to go from New York to New London. It is fair to a.s.sume then that the distance of New York from London so far as human travel goes is or will shortly be the same as the distance of New York from New London when Wood was born.

Roughly speaking since Wood was born intercourse between persons by means of conversation has become so perfected that it is now possible for {260} two people, one in New York and the other in San Francisco, to converse over the telephone--wireless or otherwise--as easily as could two persons when Wood was born talk from one room to another through an open doorway. So that for practical purposes the three or four thousand mile breadth of this continent is reduced to what then was a matter of ten feet.

One might continue indefinitely, but these two examples are sufficient. If San Francisco is no further away than the next room and if London can be reached as quickly as New London, and if myriads of other physical changes of this sort have occurred in sixty years, then it is fair to a.s.sume that there has been an equal amount of resulting psychological change. These changes in the relation of man to his surroundings and the consequent changes in his relations to himself and his fellow beings have probably done more to rearrange the world on a different basis than all the developments of the half-dozen centuries that preceded the nineteenth.