GREAT WAR 1898:

                      TOTAL WAR AND ATTRITION




Trench Foot


In March of 1900, Cordell Hull was a twenty-eight year old Captain of the Tennessee Volunteers. Since the war had started, in November of 1898, he had spent most of his time working in Nashville, at the Judge Advocate General’s Office, of the State of Tennessee’s War Department Headquarters. Hull was an attorney by trade but, that had been in the civilian world. He had only gone to law school after he did his time in the military. Like most white men in the Confederacy, he did a prolonged stint in the reserves and, after his time as a private soldier in a standing Tennessee infantry regiment, received a second lieutenant’s commission not long after graduating from college. His military service was completed several years before the war began but, like most men in Tennessee, he volunteered to serve again.
For Hull, serving was more than just a patriotic gesture. He had been born and raised in Pickett County. He was not old enough to remember the first war against the United States but, it had shaped his entire life at a very personal level. Pickett County sat on the international border and the US state of Kentucky was, quite literally, only shouting distance from Hull’s home. There were always Confederate troops in Pickett County and, there was always work going on along the border fortifications. People in Hull’s hometown lived with the fear that the “damn Yankee’s” would one day return.
By March of 1900, that fear had been realized and as Hull worked in a lawyers office, safely in the state capital, it was with the knowledge that his home and family were living under the rule of US Military Law. There were many stories about how cruel the occupational authorities were and, while Hull was an educated man and must have realized that many of these stories were just war time propaganda, he had to have the sneaking suspicion that a good number of these tales had at least a grain of truth to them. This must have been why Hull was not content to spend the rest of the war working behind a desk.
It did not take much for Hull to get his wish. As the war dragged on, and 1899 turned into 1900, the only thing that was really required to go to the front was just to ask. The fact that Hull found himself commanding a company from the 16th Texas Rifles is testimony to that. Before the war it was rare to have men from two separate states in the same unit, let alone commanding a company. By 1900, when Confederate units were rotated off the line, there was usually a mad scramble for those units to replace losses and the competition to fill those positions was fierce. When a man like Hull volunteered, to serve in your unit, you took him no matter what state he was from. When Hull reported to his new unit, that was refitting near Huntingdon, he would find that he was far from the only non-Texan there. In fact, most of the replacements were not from Texas and there was even one man from England.
Hull would spend six weeks with B Co 1/16 TRR, training, getting to know his people, and settling in before they would be put back on the line just north of Fort Bragg, Tennessee. That was not to say that he was ready for the job, just yet. In Hull’s wartime memoirs, he made no secret of the fact that he was not ready. He still had time to learn some critical lessons before they became life or death. As time went on, the men who really ran B Company would finally allow him to really be the commanding officer but, that was only because they had also been allowed the time to learn him and judge his worth.
The war time memoirs of Cordell Hull have been an invaluable aid to many historians. He gave a very candid and unpolished account of the average life of Johnny Kudzu. It’s very interesting to compare his writing to that of another army captain by the name of Woodbury Kane. Their writings make it sound as if they had served in the same unit but, in fact, they not only served in different units but in different armies.
Kane was a bit older than Hull. By March of 1900, he was already past 40 and considered well beyond military age. His initial service was as a Second Lieutenant in the United States Army. After his tour was up he seems to have not given the military a second glance. Kane was originally from Rhode Island but had lived in New York City a good many years before the war. He was Harvard educated and friends with a good many influential people, including Theodore Roosevelt.
Kane was quite the sportsman and probably the poster child for Victorian manhood. He boxed, fenced, hunted, and seems to have spent most of his life doing what we would now describe as extreme sports. Why he volunteered for service when the war began is a mystery but, given his past it would almost seem as if he really did view the war as an adventure. Unlike Hull, Kane would actually have to fight to get back in the army, let alone, get reinstated as an officer. It would take a letter to his friend, Theodore Roosevelt to finally get it.
Kane would spend nearly a year as one of many aides on the staff of Major General Charles Wikoff, who commanded the US 24th Infantry Division in upstate New York. By all accounts, Kane did not get along with Wikoff very well. Kane never spoke of it but, a pre war friend of his, that also worked on Kane’s staff, by the name of Hamilton Fish, did make a passing reference to it in his journal. Unfortunately Fish would be killed before the end of the war and his various papers never became a cohesive work.
It does seem likely that Kane did not get along with the General though. Kane’s service during the war showed a definite pattern of on going problems with superior officers. Even so, Kane was promoted to Captain while serving with Wikoff, although, this may or may not say much. It is a common practice in many bureaucracies to promote someone in order to get rid of them. There is no way to know for sure but, we do know that Kane was transferred to the 69th New York Infantry Regiment in the late autumn of 1899. He was not there long before he took command of E Company.
This is where the differences between Hull and Kane become more pronounced, although, these differences had little to do with the day to day tedium that is the life of any soldier in any army. When Hull took over his command he was in a rear area. Kane took command of E company while it was serving on the front lines near Saint-Remi, Quebec. His only saving grace, if you can call it that, was the fact that it was winter and the hostilities were at a minimum. The way the US Army replacement system worked, it would not have made any difference what time of year it was though. This just happened to be when the position came open and, as per the doctrine of the time, Kane filled it.
Kane spent much of that winter learning how to stay warm. While this might sound like humor, in reality, the cold was every bit as deadly as the Canadians. While many US soldiers did come from climates that were every bit as cold as Quebec, there is a distinct difference between spending the winter in a civilian home and surviving, exposed, in a trench, where something warm like a fire can flag you for an enemy artillery strike. It takes a special set of skills to survive under those conditions and, as Kane would find out, many of the veterans were unwilling to pass along the lessons they had learned from the previous winter. He was the company commander and if they were willing to ignore him then it was for certain that new privates entering the line would be equally lost.
This was becoming a problem across the front lines and it was mainly due to the replacement system that the US Army had adopted. The veterans had seen too many friends die and, as a result, most did not wish to become emotionally invested in some new guy that may or may not last a week. It was a system that fed on itself in that the replacements might have had a much better chance of survival had someone taken the time to teach them the things that they needed to know. This system meant replacements always took, at least, fifty percent higher casualties than the veterans and problems like winter survival were elevated from a surmountable obstacle to a near certain death trap.
Despite being twice as old as the average soldier, Kane had been an exceptional athlete for most of his life and was in pretty good shape. He survived till spring and by the time the tempo of operations began to accelerate, he had proven his worth to enough key members of his company to earn a certain measure or respect. He was also lucky enough to survive his first battles as the US Army resumed it’s offensive towards Montreal. By the time these engagements were over with he would be a veteran and not because he had become an expert. It was due to the sea of new faces that would flood E Co as replacements for those who had died between the trenches, in one charge after another.
Kane was appalled by this and he hid nothing in his correspondence with his old friend Roosevelt. These letters have survived to this day, in the Roosevelt Collection, so we have ample first hand evidence, and the tone is not one of a disenfranchised soldier who is only complaining. There is no doubt that Kane was far from the only company commander who was starting to notice one or two things but, in this case we have a clear record. Here, we know that Kane began thinking about how to avoid the mass slaughter around him. One thing is very clear in his correspondence, he was positive that it could be avoided.