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Updated: May 23, 2025
He declined to tell what had been his connections or his life before coming to our shores, but he was evidently a man of education and refinement; he was an admirable horseman, swordsman, and drill-master; he had evidently been trained for the military profession.
His performance on that occasion was so grotesquely awkward that I directed he should be put through the "squad-drill" by one of the sergeants, who was a thoroughly competent, but rather severe, drill-master. The "cook" felt that his rights were invaded, in requiring him to submit to be drilled. The sergeant made no progress in teaching him.
My mother and my uncle came over to see me twice during their stay at Hastings, and during one of the visits my uncle spoke to the Doctor about the drill-master, and, after expressing a wish that I should pay attention to that part of my studies, with fencing, asked if this instructor had been in the foot or horse. "Oh, he was in the cavalry, uncle," I said.
These should be sharply distinguished from the indigenous, evoking, and more truly educational factors described in the last paragraph, which are meaty, content-full, and relatively formless as to time of day, method, spirit, and perhaps environment and personnel of teacher, and possibly somewhat in season of the year, almost as sharply as work differs from play, or perhaps as the virility of man that loves to command a phalanx, be a martinet and drill-master, differs from femininity which excels in persuasion, sympathetic insight, story-telling, and in the tact that discerns and utilizes spontaneous interests in the young.
He had volunteered in the infantry, and at the battle of Cold Harbor received a wound in the leg which disqualified him for a foot-soldier thenceforward. His friends succeeded in procuring for him the commission of lieutenant, and he was assigned to duty as drill-master at a camp of instruction near Richmond.
Eventually my prejudices were in a measure overcome by what I heard from our drill-master, a retired non-commissioned officer, who had served in the Crimea, and who told us some rousing anecdotes about the gallantry of "our allies" at the Alma and elsewhere. In the result, the old sergeant's converse gave me "furiously to think" that there might be some good in the French after all.
One sees more men in Germany who give the impression that they could not by any possibility ever have been boys than with us. They begin to look cramped at thirty, and they are stiff at fifty, as though they had been fed on a diet of circumspection, caution, and obedience. They are drilled early and they soon become amenable, and then even indulgent, toward the drill-master.
He seemed the Genius of Order as he educated and arranged the chaotic gathering of human beings, who came before him to be transmuted from farmers, merchants, clerks, shopkeepers, and what not into soldiers of all arms and into leaders of soldiers. To that host in chrysalis he was what each skillful drill-master is to his awkward squad.
He speedily organised and placed in the field a splendid army, and it was fondly expected that a few months with such troops as his would end the war. But M'Clellan, though a brave soldier and an able man, was a disappointment. Like the father of Frederick the Great, he was an ideal drill-master, but an indifferent general.
"I've just been watching Corporal Barrow and his new recruit squad, Sergeant," Dick announced. "The men are doing first-rate for new men. Corporal Barrow is a patient and competent drill-master." "Yes, sir," Kelly replied, without trace of a smile. "The patient instructor is the only one who can teach a recruit, Sergeant.
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