Page:History of the 305th field artillery (IA historyof305thfi01camp).pdf/25

Rh covery; and it had a miserable habit of falling languidly over into the mud unless it was supported by a comrade who had the strength and the will to fight off an army.

Yet we shaved. Yet we contrived to look clean.

"Horrors of war, No. 1,” we labelled our pipe.

So we struggled on, preparing ourselves as best we could for the day when the first enlisted men would arrive. We gazed at night with new interest at the multitude of fires that blazed, crimson, against the forest, surrounded by ragged groups of workmen, who sat for the most part in a sullen and unnatural quiet. For the miracles happened under our eyes. Day by day the wilderness receded, the mushroom city spread. This morning you might walk in a thicket. To-morrow you would find it cleared land, untidy with the beginnings of buildings. A faith grew that the 305th would have a home.

Side by side with these, other and more intimate miracles developed. Colonel Doyle established a regimental headquarters on a mess table in the mess hall of J1. Whatever stateliness it may have acquired later, headquarters went in those days, as one might say, on hands and knees. Colonel Doylc explained how things should be done, and we did our best to do them right. Already from the pots and pans of J1 Paper Work raised an evil head and sneered at us.

Before we'd got the table really untidy with baskets and typewriters and files and reports, other organizations came enviously in, and established headquarters on that table too. There was a machine gun battalion, the ammunition train, and maybe a bakery company or so. Things became rather too confused for an accurate count. We stole quietly to J20, to the upper floor of which we had already moved our sleeping quarters.

That same afternoon Major Wanvig appeared, bearing under each arm an oblong board sign. One he nailed at