To be a "Leavenworth man" meant a title to staff position, which you must take whether you wanted it or not. There were many excellent officers who never went to Leavenworth; officers who were masterly company, battalion, and regimental commanders, and who had the quality of natural leaders. They did not want to train for the staff. They preferred the line. Their ambition, nursed through the years of service, with never an assignment to Washington, was to make sure of a command in the field if war came. "I had rather lead a battalion of infantry than be chief of staff of an army," as one of them said. Another said, early in the war, "I'm all for the Leavenworth men to do the chessboard work, but we'll find that they have studied so much that some of them don't know how to make decisions when they are dealing with a real instead of a paper army. I don't envy them. I obey their orders. I'll make a good regiment; that is all I ask--let me be with troops." He was right in saying that the men who stood high at Leavenworth ran the danger of being too academic for practical war, as surely as the best students at college are unfitted for practical business life. Yet all criticism of the Leavenworth coterie runs foul of the question: "What should we have done without them in France?" If you have to build a great bridge and there is no engineer who has ever erected one, why, it would be better to choose a man who had been through a first-class engineering school to make the plans, than to choose the contractors who got out the stone or sunk the caissons, or the financiers who furnished the funds. Every Leavenworth man had pet ideas of his own, as the result of his study, which he sought to apply when authority came to him, with inevitable interference with team-play. He had all the enthusiasm of a graduate of the Beaux-Arts who is given a million-dollar appropriation to build a state capitol as his first assignment.