Guarding the Border: The Military Memoirs of the Ward Schrantz, 1912-1917

The Missouri National Guard

nature, kindly or otherwise, endowed me with an innate interest in military subjects and in military history and my boyhood in Carthage, Mo. was filled with thoughts along that line. Veterans of the great Civil War were all about in my home town at that time and many of them willing enough to tell their experiences to an interested small boy.1 This, together with the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in the spring of 1898, with the epidemic of wars [in] various places in the world the next six years, all liberally treated in newspapers and magazines, fostered and encouraged the natural inclination. Campaigns in Cuba and in the Philippines ; the Boxer rebellion, the Boer War, and the Russian-Japanese war, all were subjects of boyhood conversation and games. These things naturally influenced mental trends and most of the small boys with whom I “played war,” eventually served in the national guard, army or marines in the next 15 years even before our entry into the First World War put so many men in uniform. As a boy between seven and eight years old I saw the local national guard company—the Carthage Light Guard—march away as Company A, Second Missouri Volunteer Infantry, to the railway station to entrain for Jefferson Barracks.2 They appeared huge men to me, a small boy, as I stood in the muddy street watching them—blue uniformed, their long 1872-model caliber 45 Springfield rifles, sloped off their shoulders at what seemed neat angles to me but probably were not; their knapsacks on their 1 The Missouri National Guard The Missouri National Guard 11 backs with the blankets in a small roll transversely across the top.3 In memory, looking back at them, they still seem huge—viewing them as I still do mentally from the altitude of a seven-year-old boy. I did not know then—or I would have been happier at being too small for the war—that years later I would march away myself in the same company and from the same armory as a sergeant to the Mexican border troubles, or that I would again march away with it as its captain at the beginning of the First World War and would command it when it first went into battle. In later years I became well acquainted with Col. W. K. Caffee, then the commander of that volunteer regiment, and of Capt. John A. McMillan, then company commander, and heard from their own lips the story of the regiment’s activities and trials in the months that followed.4 It was an old unit, as Missouri national guard organizations went, having been formed in 1876 under the influence of Col. Caffee, then one of the gilded youth of the town and fresh from Shattuck, military school, but with its first officers and a nucleus of its rank and file veterans of the great Civil War, some of the Confederate army, some of the Federal. And as commander of the company in later years I took pride in the fact that within 11 years after the Civil War closed, in this town of southwest Missouri which the hostilities had reduced to ashes and around which the border war was most bitter, veterans of opposing armies could get together in the same military organization. And still as a seven-year-old boy I watched a second volunteer unit— Co. G, 5th Missouri Volunteer Infantry—march away, unarmed and in civilian clothes, for the train to Jefferson Barracks. I was to hear much of Capt. George P. Whitsett, its commander, later. After his company was mustered out he gained publicity in connection with some proposed fil[i]bustering expedition to Nicaragua, nipped in the bud by our own government but for which he had signed up a number of his volunteer soldiers. Then he became an officer in the 34th (?) U.S. Volunteer Infantry in the Philippines and wrote letters to the home newspapers about fighting in northern Luzon.5 Still later he was connected with the constabulary there and was some kind of a judge in the administration of the island. Newspaper readers in tho[s]e days heard much of the “water-cure,” a form of torture said to have been inflicted on suspected native guerrillas in the Philippines to make them confess their offenses, and in my imagination 12 Chapter 1 I connected...