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Updated: May 2, 2025
The successful defense of the Dardanelles, one of the most brilliantly conducted defensive operations of the entire war, was primarily due to the courage and stubborn endurance of Turkey's Anatolian soldiery, ignorant, stolid, hardy, fearless peasants, who were taken straight from their farms in Asia Minor, put into wretchedly made, ill-fitting uniforms, hastily trained by German drillmasters, set down in the trenches on the Gallipoli ridge and told to hold them.
I had seen Kitchener's first hundred thousand at work on Salisbury Plain under old, retired drillmasters who, however eager, were hazy about modern tactics. The men under them had the spirit which will endure the drudgery of training. With time they must learn to be soldiers. More raw material, month after month, went into the hopper.
Why, something Krupp could not manufacture at Essen nor the drillmasters of the Kaiser create! The human will the spirit that is God's creature, and His alone. I was in France, you'll mind. I remember weel hoo I went ower the ground where the Canadians stood the day the first clouds of poison gas were loosed. There were sae few o' them sae pitifully few!
The immensity of the task of transforming a non-military people into a great fighting force grew on one in all its humdrum and vital details as he watched the new army forming. "Are you learning to think in big numbers?" was Lord Kitchener's question to his generals. Half of the regular officers were killed or wounded. Where the leaders? Where the drillmasters for the new army?
Digby made his peace with Cromwell, and professes his readiness to spend his blood for him. He kept well with both sides, and we are not surprised to find Hooke saying that he hears no good of him from any. The early colonists found it needful to bring over a few trained soldiers, both as drillmasters and engineers.
Many of the cadets were called away as drillmasters at camps established in different parts of the South, and later became distinguished officers in the Confederate Army, as did also a large number of the older alumni of the Institute.
Born feudists became snipers, counter jumpers became fencibles, yokels became drillmasters, sweat-shop hands became sharpshooters, aliens became Americans, an ex-janitor Austrian-born became a captain, a rabble became an organised unit; the division became a tempered mettlesome lance springy, sharp and dependable.
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