Page:History of the 305th field artillery (IA historyof305thfi01camp).pdf/81

Rh crowd at a parade. Their brief cheers touched formality. They were restrained. They vibrated with a quality a little choked. Suddenly one realized that the men and women, unrecognizable in the night, were those that loved us.

Automatically one recalled stories of the departures of regiments from New York for the Civil War. Always such pictures were set in sunshine, with a ring of quaint costumes and a brave show of flags and music. We had looked forward to something of the sort.

There was music, all the more brassily insolent because its source was unseen; and, lost in the shadows, we knew our flags shook in the tepid air. The rest was wholly contrast. The columns, swinging up through the dark, pushed back the restless shapes. The door of the armory opened, and the shapes slipped through. They had to traverse a broad band of light; and, as we looked, I think it came to all of us quite abruptly, that it was simpler to be of the offering than among those who tended the altar.

On our return to Upton we entered the age of packing—a most complicated and laborious epoch. Every day and until far in the night the mess halls resounded to a new activity. Battery carpenters hammered on packing cases. Painting details striped them with maroon and white, the division colors. Packing details filled them with instruments, and ordnance, quartermaster, signal, and engineer properly—and paper work. From duplicate lists clerks checked everything in. Typewriters clattered on the tables. In one corner two men bent over, tap-tap-tapping numbers and names on identification disks like a new race of Nibelungs. In another an exchange had been established, and brisk bargaining over odd sizes of equipment imposed on the general pandemonium a shrill note of wheedling or invective. Such harness as we had was