All the while we were provoking Spain to wrath, we were using sugared cut-throat words to our own people. Well-meaning idealists, thinking to calm our citizens, were really running them into misery. Two years before the twister struck us, Mr. Livingstone in the Congress of our nation, rose and stated: “I do not take much stock in an early war with Spain or England.” The same day on the same floor Uncle Joe Cannon said, “I want to say that I do not believe we will have war the coming year, nor the year after. I doubt if there will be any during this century or perhaps the early years of the next century.” At the same time in Europe, Czar Nicholas II of Russia showed how arbitration would settle everything; and books and articles were published proving that modern mechanisms would make war result in suicide--in short that war was impossible. Under this dangerous racket of propaganda the only attention paid to our land forces, was to pick at them and tear off little pieces. Any attempt to keep us from slaughtering and distressing our youth needlessly as we’d done in the past, was laughed out of court. When the twister struck us, the army was just the same size it had been twenty-two years before. Little groups of soldiers were scattered all over the west and on our borders. The overhead of these little posts had become drab routine. The War Department was clogged with thirty years’ mold. Its personnel was just sufficient to carry on a peanut-stand administration and supply. There was no thought for expansion or operating the army as a whole. There were no plans, no staffs, no proper maps of Cuba, no set-up for any respectable force. The army had not been brought together since the Civil War--a third of a century before. No officer in the service had commanded more than a regiment, about 700 men, and few had seen that many together. The soldiers had had no chance to act as a unit, as an organization, as a going concern. Supplies of all sorts were lacking--food, equipment, guns and ammunition, everything. We had not learned a single lesson from a hundred years of horrible disasters of our own making. We showed to the world the greatest unreadiness we’d had since we’d been a nation. We still persisted in the idea that an able bodied man was a soldier. The President in this belief called out one hundred twenty-five thousand volunteers when there wasn’t ammunition enough in the country to let them fight one battle. The people seemed to feel we were going out with brass bands playing to bag the Spaniard. One day in a conference, the President turned to the Secretary of War and asked, “How soon can you put an army into Cuba?” Said the Secretary, “I can put 40,000 men there in ten days.” Later we found out we couldn’t put half that number there in two months.