The Kansas City sun. (Kansas City, Mo.) 1908-1924, 1917-08-18
OFFICERS TRAINING CAMP.

When it was recently called to the
attention of Colonel c. C. Ballou, Com
mandant of the Officers Training
School for Colored men at Fort Des
Moines, that there was a tendency on
the part of acquaintance to criticize
candidates who are being discharged
and returned home, said:
MANY persons seem to feel that
failure to complete the prescribed
course at an officers training camp
carries with it a certain stigma ap-
proXimating to disgrace.
This is, in general, not true, and is
only true in cases of men sent home
by reason of misconduct.
There is more dangerous and enron
eous belief than that INDUCED in by
many of our people, to the effect that
any and every man can become a
good military officer. This idea is al
most equivalent to the notion that
putting a uniform on a man and a rifle
in his hands makes him a soldier.
Both ideas are as incorrect and funda-
mentally absurd as would be the be-
lief that putting a scalpel in a mans
hands converts him into a surgeon,
or that putting on the cap of a naval
officer qualities a man to navigate
and fight a battleship.
Not the least useful result of oul
great training camps will be the cor
rection of these absurd notions.
1 once mustered into service as an
officer of high rank, a man who frank
ly said: 81 don't know anything about
military matters. I don't know how
to get my regiment going, and if I
once get it going, l wouldn't know
how TO stop it again" Yet twelve
hundred lives, and untold national in,
terests were made dependent upon
this utterly unqualified nan for pure
ly political reasons.
The mass of the people have had
very little idea of the danger and
disaster that lie behind such appoint
ments, but there are, nevertheless,
many wives, mothers and sisters who
are beginning to realize that they
don't want husbands, sons, fathers
and brothers ordered in battle by men
who don't know how to give them
the least show for their lives. And
these thaining camps are going t
vastly increase the appreciation o
the simple proposition that a soldier
needs to know his business just a;
does the surgeon, the lawyer, the sail
or. the electrician and every othel
nan of profession or trade.
Furthermore, they will spread a con
ception of the fact hat Army officers
on whose competence or incompetence
depends the lives of men and the fate
of nations, require for the proper dis
charge of their grave duties, training
and abilities of a higher order ano
a more varied character than do meI
of any other profession in life.
1t is, therefore, only reasonable tc
expect that large numbers of those
who enter Officers Training Camps
will find after a few weeks trial that
they were not destined by nature fol-
the duties and responsibilities of mill
tary command. This fact should in,
volve no reproach. 1t is no more dis.
graceful TO be a misfit at an officers
training camp than to be a similar
misfit in training for the church choir.
Real military leaders are as rare as
good musicians, and tho unfit must
be eliminated as ruthlessly as are the
discordant a~spirants for a place in
the orchestra, and this elimination is
not evidence that the rejected ones are
not good men, brave men or patriotic