Much of the opposition to and suspension of military training in the schools arises from a misunderstanding of what modern military training really consists of. And this misunderstanding, it is only fair to say, is not confined solely to teachers and anxious parents and professional pacifists, but is shared in almost equal measure by a certain moss-grown type of army officers, both Federal and militia. Modern war has little practical use for the old-fashioned style of parade drill and elaborate military evolutions, marching and counter-marching, right wheeling and left wheeling, with the lines kept as straight as a ramrod, and every trouser stripe swinging forward at precisely the same instant and angle as every other.
These parade ground stunts and armory floor tricks are about as much use in actual twentieth century fighting as the cotillion or an Indian ghost dance, and any regiment which would attempt to pull one of them out of the field of battle would be literally shot to pieces before it knew what had happened. They were sent to the scrap heap—excepting in military academies—twenty years ago by the high velocity magazine rifle, with its two-mile range, and the seven-mile howitzer with its exploding shell blew up the last remnant of their practical utility and turned man back five million years into a burrowing animal again.
Indeed, so little has this kind of so-called military training to do with real war that neither Germany nor France gives any of it in their schools at all, that is to say, under the age of eighteen years. 