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10 2 ToBeInstructedintheDarkArt andMysteryofManagingMen” JuniorOfficersintheOldArmy In his 1888 short story “Only a Subaltern,” Rudyard Kipling wrote of his young subject: “He became an officer and a gentleman, which is an enviable thing.” In the story Kipling also noted that the subaltern was expected to sit at the feet of his veteran captain “to be instructed in the dark art and mystery of managing men.”1 To understand the First World War US Army’s conception of company-level leadership, we must first appreciate the prewar Regular Army’s expectations for its junior leaders and its system and traditions for passing on to its young officers and NCOs those leadership traits and skills that would allow them to command in combat. In the first decade of the twentieth century the US Army’s conception of leadership was a complex mixture of long-held attitudes and assumptions and more recent and novel ideas about military professionalism . This was most apparent in the Regular Army’s often paradoxical attitudes and assumptions toward its junior leaders. On one hand, the army continued to follow eighteenth-century ideas of leadership that focused on gentility, noblesse oblige, paternalism, deference , and an apprenticeship approach to officership. On the other hand, the turn-of-the-twentieth-century army also embraced professionalism and specialist education, meritocracy, and a drive for scientific management and efficiency. It was from this conflicted crucible that the officers and NCOs of the Regular Army developed their expectations of the attributes, proper background, and experiences needed for their wartime junior leaders and the role that the army expected them to play in combat in World War I. The army of the World War I era had no set doctrine to define, codify, or explain the organization’s views on leadership. In fact, the Field Service Regulations of 1913 (FSR), the army’s definitive doctrinal work at the beginning of World War I, made only vague and passing references to the command and management of soldiers in combat .2 This oversight was not lost on certain members of the officer corps. In 1911 Robert Bullard, the future commander of the AEF’s Second Army, noted, “As far as I know, hardly a suggestion is contained in the whole West Point curriculum of the need or value to a “ 11 “Dark Art and Mystery” young officer of knowing or understanding either his soldiers or his fellow countrymen.” Another regular officer complained: “We have lectures and manuals and treatises and textbooks on all sorts of technical subjects. On the subject of how to manage men, the most important subject of all, the young officer will find pretty nearly a barren field. A few paragraphs in Army Regulations, a few scattered magazine articles, and a general order or two compose the literature available . Neither at West Point, or our service schools, has this subject received the attention that it deserves.” But while the prewar army lacked a set leadership doctrine, it still understood the centrality of leadership to combat operations and had developed its own institutional norms to define its expectations of officers and NCOs.3 While they lived in a world of massive technological, economic, and social change, it is interesting to note the degree to which the Regular Army’s prewar junior officers and NCOs were shaped by concepts of leadership based on paternalism, noblesse oblige, and social deference that dated back to the founding of the Republic. For example , Frank McCoy, who would rise to command a brigade during World War I, reminded young lieutenants that “by law an officer is set down as an officer and a gentleman and with that high privilege there goes noblesse oblige.”4 This concept of paternalism rested upon the assumption that if the leader looked after the welfare and comfort of his soldiers, they in turn would reciprocate with loyalty and obedience. One also finds these institutional norms of paternalism and deference propagated in the semiofficial manuals for NCOs and junior officers written by veteran Regular Army officers for commercial sale. Since the army lacked its own doctrinal guides and manuals to instruct its company-level leaders in the art of leadership, these books became a key source for passing on the military’s culture and institutional wisdom to its corporals, sergeants, and lieutenants. These works, such as James A. Moss’ Officer’s Manual, O. O. Ellis and E. B. Garey’s The Plattsburg Manual, and M. B. Stewart’s Handbook for Noncommissioned Officers of Infantry, transmitted the army...

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