Chapter 51: Cadets
It was improper—not a good way to start things.
I shook my head as I watched the five officer cadets leave the Casa Real through the window of the sala. I had been forced to let them go home at the end of the day.
I had assumed that these young men, having shown up in the morning, were already committed to training. But Colonel Abad informed me—just after I dismissed the recruits from the plaza—that this was not the case.
He had merely introduced them as "candidates"; nothing was final yet. None of them had even asked their parents for permission or packed properly for a prolonged stay.
Truthfully, I had not been prepared to receive them either. Their training regimen, although derived from that of the recruits, was still unwritten. I didn’t even have accommodations ready for them.
Still, it left a bitter aftertaste. Especially after I had made them take the oath, issued their uniforms, and called them cadets.
And after making them stand for hours in formation and march under the heat of the sun—giving them a taste of the hardships to come—I wondered how many would return.
Despite the uncertainty, I ordered Vicente and Dimalanta to vacate the guest room they had been staying in and prepare it for the cadets. There were vacant servant rooms on the first floor of the Casa Real that could be repurposed.
That night, I sat at my bedside table and wrote another manual—a draft for the officer cadets’ training schedule. Their program would overlap heavily with that of the recruits but would be tougher and more specialized. The goal was to make them physically and intellectually superior to the soldiers they would one day lead.
It was quite a revolutionary idea for the time. Traditionally, aristocratic officers weren’t expected to train harder than the rank-and-file—only to be noble and brave.
But if I could manage it, it could make all the difference. An army, after all, is only as good as its leaders.