War & Peace Quote by John H. Morgan

Discipline is being framed here not as a virtue but as an administrative reflex: see a body out of place, seize it, deliver it. Morgan’s sentence has the clang of institutional machinery, built to make discretion feel like dereliction. The key move is in “made the duty of every Commanding Officer” - responsibility is distributed downward so that enforcement becomes automatic. No one gets to shrug and say the problem belongs to someone else. The order manufactures compliance by making commanders police one another’s manpower.

The intent is plain: choke off absenteeism and desertion by turning the entire department into a net. “Absent from his command” is deliberately broad, catching everyone from a straggler to an opportunist to an exhausted man who simply didn’t make it back. The phrase “without the regular leave in writing” elevates paperwork into moral proof. If your absence can’t be translated into the correct document, it becomes a kind of offense against the system itself.

Subtext: authority is anxious. Armies issue this sort of language when cohesion is fraying - when movement, rumor, and improvisation threaten the chain of command more than the enemy does. “Under guard” isn’t just about preventing escape; it’s theater, a public signal that the institution can still compel bodies to return to their assigned places.

Contextually, the cadence echoes mid-19th-century military bureaucracy, where Regulations and General Orders were the script that made sprawling, mobile forces governable. Morgan’s rhetorical power lies in how it converts a messy human reality into a simple procedural trigger: find, arrest, forward.