correspond to a few days on a football squad. Washington and Steuben couldn’t count on what material they could coach or could have for any one game. Green Americans against expert British, were the rule. If you can picture a coach on any gridiron receiving from the farm or the store a new set of men every two days, with most of the old set leaving at the same time, and attempting to produce a team for a game each Saturday, you have in a mild way Washington’s situation. We know that when we put untrained and unconditioned men into a football game, we reap more serious injuries than if the men are hardened and trained. If those casualties exist where the human body is the only weapon, how _much more_ unspeakable are the added injuries where bad weather, poor shelter, loss of food and sleep, bullets and cannon balls were the weapons. So in the Revolution we put men in a more terrible plight than we’d think of allowing even in modern football. But a more surprising thing is what we did after the war was over. We dismissed our entire coaching staff and all of the squad except 80 men, who just worked around the training quarters and received no practice or instruction in the game. Our people had the idea that there would never be another game. They contended that any attempt at a continuous coaching system with a paid staff was getting back to professionalism--to despotism and tyranny. Since armies in Europe were playthings of Kings, then all armies would be that way. They took the same line of reasoning as the man who says, “Since some church members are hypocrites, then all churches are wrong.” Washington tried his best with all his pleading and logic, to show how false was such a view. He begged and advised in so many of his letters and testaments that it seems nothing could be more important to him. He wrote of the Revolution: “Had we formed a permanent army in the beginning--we should not have been the greatest part of the war inferior to the enemy, indebted for our safety to their inactivity, enduring frequently the mortification of seeing opportunities to ruin them pass unimproved for the want of a force, which the country was completely able to afford; and of seeing the country ravaged, our towns burnt, the inhabitants plundered, abused, murdered with impunity from the same cause.” He also wrote, “To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace.” Henry Lee, Governor of Virginia about the same time went further. “Convinced as I am that a government is the murderer of its citizens which sends them to the field uninformed and untaught, where they are to meet men of the same age and strength, mechanized by education and discipline for battle, I cannot withhold my denunciation of its wickedness and folly.” Thus the people were warned against their slump--and we shall soon see how they paid for it. _V_ THE FIELD MEET