I HAD enlisted for a soldier shortly after my visit to Alonzo Berners and because I was broke and could see no other way to avoid going back into a factory. The voices crying out for war with Spain, for the freeing of Cuba, I had heard not at all but there had been a voice within myself that was plain and clear enough and I did not believe there was danger of many battles being fought. The glory of Spain, read about in the books, was dead. We had old Spain at a disadvantage, poor old woman. The situation was unique. America, the young and swaggering giant of the West had been fortunate. She had not been compelled to face, on the field of battle, the giant of the Old World in the days of her Old World strength. Now the young western giant was going to assert himself and it would be like taking pennies from a child, like robbing an old gypsy woman in a vacant lot at night after a fair. The newspapers might call into service Stephen Crane, Richard Harding Davis, all the writers of battle tales trying to work up the illusion of a great war about to be fought, but no one believed, no one was afraid. In the camps the soldiers laughed. Songs were being sung. To the soldiers the Spaniards were something like performers in a circus to which the American boys had been invited. It was said they had bells on their hats, wore swords and played guitars under the windows of ladies’ bedrooms at night. America wanted heroes and I thought I would enjoy being a hero and so I did not enlist for a soldier in Chicago, where I was unknown and my rushing to my country’s aid might have passed unnoticed, but sent off a wire to the captain of militia of my home town in Ohio and got on a train to go there. Alonzo Berners had pressed upon me a loan of a hundred dollars but I did not want to spend any of it for railroad fare so beat my way homeward on a freight train and even the hoboes with whom I sat in an empty freight car treated me with respect as though I were already the hero of a hundred hard-fought battles. At a station twenty miles from home I bought a new suit of clothes, a new hat, neckties and even a walking stick. My home town would want to think I had given up a lucrative position in the city to answer my country’s call, they would want a Cincinnatus dropping his plow handles, and why should I not give them the best imitation I could manage? What I achieved was something between a bank clerk and an actor out of work. I was received with acclaim. Never before that time or since have I had a personal triumph and I liked it. When, with the others of my company, I marched away to the railroad station to entrain for war the entire town turned out and cheered. Girls ran out of houses to kiss us and old veterans of the Civil War--they had known that of battles we would never know--stood with tears in their eyes.