ON

ENLISTING

AND

DISCHARGING SOLDIERS.

INTRODUCTION.

IN the formation of an army, upon the efficiency of which may depend the safety of the state, two principles of the utmost importance must be kept in view: one, that no man, a proper subject for military duty, be exempted; the other, that the service be not encumbered with men unfitted for it by reason of mental, moral, or physical infirmities. It is the purpose of the recruiting officer in time of peace, when the strength of the army is maintained by voluntary enlistments, as it is of enrolment and conscription acts in time of war, to obtain the one and exclude the other. To promote

the continued efficiency of the army, these principles must be constantly applied, rendering it necessary, on the one hand, to use the utmost skill and ingenuity in detecting feigned, factitious, aggravated, and exaggerated diseases, and, on the other, to discharge those disqualified by infirmities which escaped the observation of the examining surgeon, or who have become disabled by accidents or diseases incident to military life. Upon the faithfulness and thoroughness with which the duties of enlisting and discharging soldiers are performed, depend the numerical strength of the army, its health, its efficiency in battle, and especially its mobility. How far the success of military movements is influenced by these circumstances, is apparent enough. The multiplication of armes de précision has not supplied legs to armies or obviated the necessity for physical power in individual soldiers. War, in modern times, consists so much in the science of making men march for the purpose of striking an unexpected blow on the enemy, that the efficiency of soldiers depends greatly on their capacity for executing long marches with comparative ease. Marshal Saxe and General Foy, both of whom had great military experience, do not hesitate in stating that the

secret of war lies in the power of marching,namely, in the strength of the legs.*

The successes of Napoleon's military operations were due in no small degree to rapidity of combinations and celerity of movements, or, in other words, to the physical efficiency of his troops. Reverses began when the necessities of the emperor and the exhaustion of the matured portion of the population required that the conscription be enforced with more rigor and the army recruited from a levy of conscripts under twenty years of age, less carefully selected. The capacity to endure fatigue and long marches is not less a requirement now than it was to the Roman soldier, who marched, carrying a load of sixty pounds, twenty miles and more a day. Railroad communications may and do powerfully assist in military movements; but their aid is local and of limited application, whilst physical stamina is universally applicable. The tendency in these days is to decry the necessity for a high standard of physical efficiency in the constitution of an army, and to exaggerate the importance of improved arms.

There is another aspect of the question, too

* Marshall on Enlisting and Discharging Soldiers, page 10. † Vegetius i. 10; Liv. iii. 27.

important to be disregarded,-the pecuniary. "To put a soldier in the field costs the Government nearly four hundred dollars; "* to maintain him in the hospital costs not less than twenty-five dollars per month, besides his pay and allowances. The sick and the disabled, derived from any source soever, are serious encumbrances to the movements of an army: they cannot be abandoned; they must follow the army or be removed to a general hospital; and attendants and ambulance trains become necessary to their care and comfortable transportation.

It follows, then, from the consideration of the military necessities and the pecuniary results, that the application of the second of the two propositions with which this chapter opens is more important to the interests of the Government. It is an unwise policy to restrict within doubtful limits the causes of exemption from military service. In a country like this, where the general standard of health and physical stamina is high, and the number of cases of incomplete or arrested development of chronic, incurable, and constitutional diseases are in small proportion to the whole

* A Treatise on Hygiene: W. A. Hammond, Surgeon-General U.S. Army.

population, it becomes the less necessary to include in an enrolment or conscription cases admitting of reasonable doubt as to their sufficiency to fulfil all the requirements of the military service.

Under the provisions of the "act for enrolling and calling out the national forces," approved March 3, 1863, the determination of the physical and mental fitness for military duty devolves upon the Board of Enrolment, whose decision is final. The importance of a rigid attention to the two great principles enunciated in this introduction will appear in the results of these examinations; for if, on the one hand, injudicious laxity shall be the rule, the army will be burdened with useless recruits; on the other, if a wise discretion shall govern, and drafted men be exempted whose powers, mental and physical, are inadequate, the army will be fitted for the work in hand.

The examining surgeon of a recruit for the regular army certifies on honor that he has carefully examined the recruit agreeably to the general regulations of the army, and that it is his opinion that the recruit is free from all bodily defects or mental infirmity which would in any way disqualify him for the performance of military duty.