There it remained all through the hot summer of 1846, doing nothing, and awaiting the regiments of volunteers that were being raised in the states.

We must linger here a moment and take a good look at General Zachary Taylor, for the reason that he became, in a sense, a sort of life-pattern for Grant. Taylor was not a West Point man. The young officer had never seen a soldier of high rank who resembled Taylor in the least. His military superiors at West Point and in the army had all been rigid men, precise and spotless, who said yea and nay in voices that were as smooth as milk and as cold as ice. Taylor was not of their breed. He wore the coat of a private soldier, carelessly thrown on his back, and his boots were muddy. He had a large heart and a burry manner. When he did not like people he got angry about it, and his mouth filled with hot words. "Dirty in person, uneducated, eccentric, he was yet a great natural leader of men and exceedingly popular with his soldiers," H. J. Eckenrode says of him. "He blundered into victories in an amazing way, and all of his battles were victories. Rough and practical, Taylor had a natural distaste for West Point fastidiousness and airiness. . . .”

Among the volunteer regiments was one from Mississippi commanded by Jefferson Davis, a lean, gray-eyed, sensitive man of intellectual habits. His first wife had been General Taylor's daughter. As a member of Congress Davis had spoken ardently in favor of the annexation of Texas, and of expansion at the expense of Mexico. Though he had entered the House of Representatives only the year before the Mexican War began he had already made a name for himself as a leading champion of slavery and states' rights.

Taylor and Davis were related by marriage, but they were a thousand miles apart in mental quality. Davis was a logician —a keen and brilliant sophist. In his mind everything was kept bright and shining, and in its proper place, like the tools in a neat carpenter's chest. Taylor, on the other hand, was

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almost illiterate. He was moved by obscure emotions and was disorderly in his intellectual gestures. Davis was stubbornly opinionated; he had the narrow outlook that often goes with a high culture. His father-in-law was stubborn, too, but his stubbornness came from prejudice and ignorance.

Taylor's soldiers called him "Old Rough and Ready," and the nickname fitted him perfectly. He was always ready—and usually rough.

Grant's admiration for him glows in the following paragraphs from the Memoirs:

General Taylor was not an officer to trouble the administration much with his demands, but was inclined to do the best he could with the means given him. He felt his responsibility as going no further. If he had thought that he was sent to perform an impossibility with the means given him, he would probably have informed the authorities of his opinion and left them to determine what should be done. If the judgment was against him he would have gone on and done the best he could with the means at hand without parading his grievances before the public. No soldier could face either danger or responsibility more calmly than he. These are qualities more rarely found than genius or physical courage.

General Taylor never made any great show or parade, either of uniform or retinue. In dress he was possibly too plain, rarely wearing anything in the field to indicate his rank, or even that he was an officer.

That is Grant's picture of Zachary Taylor-and in it Grant unconsciously drew a portrait of himself, as he was during the Civil War. In Taylor he saw a slouchy man who was also a general. If Taylor could win battles sitting sideways on his horse, his coat unbuttoned, and a cigar in his mouth, why could not another man do as well?

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Now the American army, increased by a horde of disorderly volunteers, pours out of Matamoras and goes streaming southward into Mexico. The country is an ocean of sand on which the thorny desert shrubs seem to float like tangled wreckage. A glowing copper sun throws its heat on men and animals with the brutal carelessness of a maniac scattering coals of fire. Tongues are silent in the ranks. The only sounds are the crunch of feet and the click of metal. It is the hour of remorse and fantasy.

Besides the startled gray-green lizards, all spine and venom, the only moving creatures in this blazing land are sunburned men in sombreros who hang about the army's flanks and shoot down stragglers.

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master of his regiment. His job was to conduct the wagon train, pack up and move tents and blankets, pots and pans; and to issue supplies. It was a by-path that led away from military renown. The only quartermasters that are spoken of in an army are the unsuccessful ones. To be a success in this position an officer must be unobtrusive as well as efficient, like a butler in a well-ordered household.

It was desperately hard work in Mexico in the month of August, 1846. Loose sand and prickly cactus conspired with Mexican mules and overloaded wagons to make the daily moving of the regiment's housekeeping a nightmare to any one who had charge of it. Grant was, in effect, the regimental drudge. He went through his exasperating duties with the cool patience that characterized him fifteen years later in the Civil War, but he was not insensitive to the annoyances of his position. "I am not aware of ever having used a profane expletive in my life," he wrote, "but I would have the charity to excuse those who may have done so, if they were in charge of a train of Mexican pack mules. . . ."

That his name is not mentioned even once by any of the diary-keepers and memoir-writers among the officers who were engaged in the Mexican War is an interesting fact. If anything at all was written about him at the time by these gossips it has eluded a rather vigorous search. The army was small, and all the regular officers must have known one another, yet

Grant did not make a sufficient impression on any of them to get himself discussed in their reminiscences, which are, in most cases, well sprinkled with names.

Perhaps this may be partly accounted for by his position as quartermaster, which kept him usually in the rear of the column. A carelessly dressed, taciturn officer, he seldom appeared at social gatherings.

Besides his natural lack of aptitude for the jesting by-play that goes on among officers in the field, there was another reason for his solitude. Whisky was humming in his soul; he had begun to use liquor in Mexico, and he was always a solitary drinker. When he was under the influence of liquor he was morose and downcast. This trait would doubtless give him a certain isolation, and keep him out of the company of more joyous, rollicking officers.

Excessive liquor drinking is a result of personal maladjustment. Men drink because they are dissatisfied, though they are often unaware of the causes of their unhappiness. They drink because they are defeated in the sphere of psychic desire; because they are inhibited; because they are engaged in doing something that they do not want to do.

Freud says: "Under the influence of alcohol the adult again becomes a child who derives pleasure from the free disposal of his mental stream without being restricted by the pressure of logic."

In some respects Grant never got over being a boy. He was forced to become a man too quickly-a man on the outsidebut his adolescence lay always under the surface. We shall see it coming out later, in unexpected ways. . . in his naïve business dealings . . in his immature judgment of men. Liquordrinking probably released the boy that was in him.

But it is entirely plausible to believe that his bitter distaste for the military life started him in the drinking habit. We shall not understand his character at all unless we conceive him constantly as a pacifist. Yet his pacifism was chiefly