Chapter 19:
- Sneers at the staff -- the controversy with the War Department over the control of the staff Corps.
General Sherman, in his last chapter discusses at considerable length the same issues which he raised with the Secretary of War and the statute law, when he assumed the duties of general and promulgated an order assigning all officials in the War Department, except the Secretary himself, and possibly his chief clerk, to duty on his staff. In his treatment of this question he indulges in many undignified sneers at staff officers. For example:
‘The subordinates of these staff-corps and departments are selected and chosen from the army itself, or fresh from West Point, and too commonly construe themselves into the élite, as made of better clay than the common soldier. Thus they separate themselves more and more from their comrades of the line, and in process of time realize the condition of that old officer of artillery, who thought the army would be a delightful place for a gentleman if it were not for the d—d soldier; or, better still, the conclusion of the young lord in “Henry IV.,” who told Harry Percy (Hotspur) that “but for these vile guns he would himself have been a soldier.” This is all wrong; utterly at variance with our democratic form of government and of universal experience; and now that the French, from whom we had copied the system, have utterly “prescribed” it, I hope that our Congress will follow suit.’General Sherman's own military history, however, will show that it was not until he attained the rank of brigadier-general that his antipathy to staff duty began. But from that time forward it has been marked. Even the large body of staff officers in his own army, who, on the Atlanta campaign, had been continuously on duty and most of the time under
