Will it be parades, and those soul-deadening "fours
right" and "column left" affairs? Oh, my dear, let us hope not.
Nothing is so necessary in the manufacture of soldiers, sure enough, but
it is not hard to learn, and once a soldier knows it I can never
understand why it should be drilled into him until it hurts. Besides,
from another point of view, soldiers in rows and in lines do not compose
well in pictures. I always feel, after seeing infantry drill in an
armory, like Kipling's light-house keeper, who went insane looking at
the cracks between the boards--they were all so horribly alike.
Then Adobe is away out West in the blistering dust, with no towns of any
importance near it. I can understand why men might become listless when
they are at field-work, with the full knowledge that nothing but their
brothers are looking at them save the hawks and coyotes. It is different
from Meyer, with its traps full of Congressmen and girls, both of whom
are much on the minds of cavalrymen.
In due course I was bedded down at Adobe by my old friend the Captain,
and then lay thinking of this cavalry business. It is a subject which
thought does not simplify, but, like other great things, makes it
complicate and recede from its votaries. To know essential details from
unessential details is the study in all arts. Details there must be;
they are the small things that make the big things. To apply this
general order of things to this arm of the service kept me awake.
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