Page:History of the 305th field artillery (IA historyof305thfi01camp).pdf/22

4 called Military Police, and when I told him I'd never swung a billy in my life he wanted to know what that had to do with it.

"I'm in the Depot Brigate," a third grinned sheepishly. "Good God! Do we have to run the trains?"

A captain walked from the corridor and came up with a pleased smile.

“What did they hand you? someone asked.

In his voice was pride, and a vague, new responsibility.

"I'm assigned to the 305th Field Artillery, National Army."

Several joined as in a chorus:

“So are we. That's going to be the number of our regiment."

And the surprise and gloom deepened on the faces of those shifted thus unexpectedly to unforeseen branches of the service.

After that fashion the regiment was born and baptized, and we heard for the first time the significant number in which officers and men have, to an extent, merged their thoughts, their actions, and their individualities.

Colonel Fred Charles Doyle was the first to report. He came from the regular army, and received his assignment from Major-General Bell on August 28th, 1917. For ten days afterward the officers poured in and commenced to prepare for the men who would arrive in the course of the next few weeks.

Without the men, during those days of its beginnings, it wasn't, to be sure, much of a regiment, yet it possessed from the start ambition, pride of organization, and already—a noticeable factor—an instinct that ours was to be bigger, better, and more terrible to the enemy than any other regiment of Field Artillery.

Yet we went gropingly at first, asking earnest but absurd questions about equipment and rations, or demanding