Edgar W. Bass

Colonel Edgar W. Bass even more closely typified the history of what (to borrow a current military phrase of 1861) we may now refer to as “the old army.” Frontiersman, West Pointer, Indian fighter, volunteer sergeant in the Civil War, engineer, astronomer, and for twenty years teacher of mathematics at the Military Academy, his career illustrates the wide field of experience and achievement in which, before the entry of the United States into the European war, our professional soldiers learned their lesson. There were those who criticized the methods and purposes of the West Point in which Colonel Bass trod with exactness what he saw as the chalk-line of duty. These certainly did not produce the soldiers of Von Moltke or Hindenburg, and, in the light of recent history, no one will be sorry that they did not. But Cantigny, the Marne, the Mihiel Salient, and the Forest of Argonne, have shown us what our country’s quiet military preparation on the Highlands of the Hudson really meant, when the greatest of all tests of it in our military history was applied.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1919 Century Association Yearbook