Page:The history and achievements of the Fort Sheridan officers' training camps.djvu/331

 •yHEY WERE OFF!

For several months they had been waiting in cities and towns back home. The cantonments were being constructed. Some of the regulars had gone across. The National Guard, mobilized for months on the border, was prepared to embark. The First Officers' Training Camp was completed. The newly-commissioned officers had already been assigned to Camp Grant or Camp Custer, while hundreds, who had not received commissions, had enlisted at the recruiting stations, determined to see service at all costs.

Twenty thousand men had applied for the Second Reserve Officers' Training Camp at Fort Sheridan. Four thousand had been chosen. The examining boards which went through the cities and towns of Illinois, Michi- gan, Wisconsin, Kansas, Colorado and Missouri, were instructed to select men on the basis of merit only. They were to choose men who were physically fit, men of experience who had already won places of responsibility in civil life. They found men anxious, ready, competing for places, proud to be chosen and prepared to go through.

Early on the morning of August 23rd, the new "Rookies" appeared at Fort Sheridan. Some came the night before to avoid the rush. But the majority streamed in that August morning and filled up the long rows that began in the gymnasium and stretched out through the door around the corner and up the street. There were all kinds of men in that line. Grandfathers, several of them, trying to look like college graduates, and pulling their age records across the dead line w^ithout batting an eye. Congressmen, bankers and brokers, business leaders, professional leaders, deans of universities, clergymen, mechanics, golf champions and hurdle champions, actors, play- w^rights, musical critics, farmers, ranchers, miners, students.

Look at them. They are coming up in long lines like children on the first day of school.

Look at them — clothes do make some difference in a man. But in a day the natty hat band, the silk shirt, the carefully pressed suit will disappear. In their place, the old service hat, the second-grade khaki shirt, the service uniform, canvas putts and broad-toed shoes.

You will not recognize them again until you get up close and peer beneath the broad brim. Then you smile the first time. They were the same but so different.

You may never see them again in the distinguishing clothes of the civilian, for many a man who went up the line that August morning, laid down for his final sleep in the Somme or in the Argonne, dressed in the khaki which he donned for the first time at Fort Sheridan.

After they had registered and made selection of the branch of seivice they wished to enter they went to their new^ quarters.

The men from Kansas, Colorado, Missouri — newcomers to Fort Sheridan and, in a sense, guests of Illinois, were given the Brick Barracks. So were the majority of the men from Michigan and Wisconsin, as in the First Camp.

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