Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: July 20, 2025
High officers were occasionally disloyal, or willing to sacrifice their country to personal pique; still more frequently they were ignorant and inefficient; but the enlisted man had more than enough innate soldiership to make amends for these deficiencies, and his superb conduct often brought honors and promotions to those only who deserved shame and disaster.
What service this unambitious tiller of the ground had previously done for Rome to make him worthy of this distinction we are not told, but it is evident that he was looked upon as the man of highest wisdom and soldiership in Rome. Caius Nautius, the consul, appointed Cincinnatus to this high office, as he alone was privileged to do, and then hastened back to his army.
"Whatever differences of opinion may exist as to the merits of the generals against whom he had to contend, and especially of the antagonist by whom he was at last overcome, no one pretending to understand in the least either the general principles of military science or the particular conditions of the American War, doubts that General Lee gave higher proofs of military genius and soldiership than any of his opponents.
Riggs had seen three long, well-written letters in the great New York Morning Mail, obviously the work of a correspondent on the spot, an eye-witness to the scenes he had described, and these letters refuted the calumnies recently heaped on Button and his comrades gave him, in fact, high praise for soldiership, bravery, energy, even though the writer owned himself by no means one of the colonel's circle, if, indeed, one of his personal friends and admirers.
But, while averse to bloodshed, he had drilled himself into soldiership in action, always prompt, accurate and thorough, and in less than a minute he was walking up and down, rifle on shoulder, eyes open to everything that was to be seen and ears ready for everything that was to be heard. Stephen Brady, the philosopher, looked at him with approval.
Moreover, to mis-estimate athletics is equally bad whether their importance is magnified or minimized. The Greeks were famous athletes, and as long as their athletic training had a normal place in their lives, it was a good thing. But it was a very bad thing when they kept up their athletic games while letting the stern qualities of soldiership and statesmanship sink into disuse.
The men universally felt that their commander was equal to any and every emergency. Such a repute cannot be usurped. Troops measure their leaders with instinctive acumen, and a very astonishing accuracy. They form their opinions for themselves on the merits of the question; and Lee had already impressed the army with a profound admiration for his soldiership.
Of course I may be mistaken; my opinion on such a point is worth nothing, although my impression may be worth a little more; neither do I consider the General's antecedents as bearing very decided testimony to his practical soldiership.
I have heard a story, which I cannot vouch for, that when foreknowledge of his affliction, at the outbreak of our civil war, forbade him to be a soldier, he became a student of soldiership, and wreaked in that sort the passion of his most gallant spirit. But whether this was true or not, it is certain that he pursued the study with a devotion which never blinded him to the atrocity of war.
"Not if you have leave," I said. "Ask what you like." "I am afraid, nevertheless. But I can never know, if I do not ask. How is it this is what puzzles me, that other people who call themselves Christians do not think as you think about all this matter?" "Soldiership?" I asked. "Well, yes. It comes to that, I suppose." "You know what soldiership ought to be," I said.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking