Free North and South: The North and South Trilogy by John Jakes

of miseries, he thought, but this spiteful hog, sweating his collar black—he was more than a disciplinarian. He was a sadist.
    Bent’s sly little eyes sought his again. George returned the look with defiance. He knew he had made an enemy.
    The two friends asked questions about Bent. They very quickly got more information than they expected. The Ohioan was a superior student but extremely unpopular. Members of his own class willingly discussed his failings—an unusual, even rare, disloyalty and an indication of Bent’s low status.
    During Bent’s plebe year he had been subjected to an unusual amount of hazing. In the opinion of Hancock and others, he had brought it on himself with his pompous pronouncements about war and his frequent boasts about his family’s connections in Washington.
    “I would surmise that he’s a boor because he’s fat,” Bee said. “I’ve known a couple of chubby fellows who were picked on when they were small and as a consequence grew up to be mighty rotten adults. On the other hand, that doesn’t explain why Bent’s so bloody-minded. His attitude goes way beyond the proper mental set of a soldier. Goes most all the way to queerness,” the South Carolinian finished with a tap of his forehead.
    Another classmate mentioned Bent’s devotion to the Academy’s foremost professor, Dennis Mahan, who taught engineering and the science of war. Mahan believed the next great war, whatever its cause and whoever its participants, would be fought on new strategic principles.
    One was celerity. The army that could move fastest would gain the advantage. A transportation revolution was under way in America and the rest of the world. Even in this relatively depressed decade railroads were expanding everywhere. Railroads would make celerity more than a classroom theory; they would make it a reality.
    Information was Mahan’s second new principle. Information from other than the traditional earthbound scouts. The professor loved to speculate about the use of balloons for observation, and about experiments now being conducted with coded messages sent long distances along a wire.
    A great many cadets absorbed and pondered Mahan’s ideas, George and Orry were told. But few preached them as fanatically as Bent. This was impressed on them when they were unlucky enough to draw Bent as drillmaster a second time. Mahan taught that the great generals, such as Frederick and Napoleon, never fought merely to win a piece of ground but for a far more important objective—to crush utterly all means of enemy resistance. During drill, Bent delivered a queer little lecture in which he referred to this teaching of Mahan’s, then stressed the upperclassman’s duty to promote military discipline by crushing all resistance among the plebes.
    A smile wreathed his sweaty face as he held forth. But his dark little eyes were humorless. Jackson was in the squad and that day became Bent’s particular target. Bent reviled the Virginian with the nickname Dunce. He did it not once but half a dozen times.
    Back in barracks, Jackson declared that he thought Bent somewhat “tetched.” “And not a Christian. Not a Christian at all,” he added with his usual fervor.
    George shrugged. “If someone slapped you with a first name like Elkanah, maybe you’d be crazy too.”
    “I don’t know much about the Army,” Orry put in, “but I know Bent isn’t fit to command other men, and he never will be,”
    “He’s just the kind that will make it, though,” George said. “Especially if he has those connections he brags about.”
    It was traditional for the first classmen to fling their hats in the air at their last parade, then harry them around the Plain by kicking them and stabbing them with their bayonets. That was the entire West Point graduation.
    Soon after the ceremony, the first classmen left, having willed or sold their uniforms and blankets to friends remaining behind. Each class then moved up, and the Board of Visitors,