In the latter part of October, 1915, I decided that the United States ought to be fighting along with England and France on account of the way Belgium had been treated, if for no other reason. As there seemed to be a considerable division of opinion on this point among the people at home, I came to the conclusion that any man who was free, white, and twenty-one and felt as I did, ought to go over and get into it single-handed on the side where his convictions led him, if there wasn’t some particular reason why he couldn’t. Therefore, I said good-by to my parents and friends in Lexington, and started for New York with the idea of sailing for France, and joining the Foreign Legion of the French Army. A couple of nights after I got to New York I fell into conversation in the Knickerbocker bar with a chap who was in the reinforcement company of Princess Pat’s regiment of the Canadian forces. After my talk with him, I decided to go up to Canada and look things over. I arrived at the Windsor Hotel, in Montreal, at eight o’clock in the morning, a couple of days later, and at ten o’clock the same morning I was sworn in as a private in the Canadian Grenadier Guards, Eighty-seventh Overseas Battalion, Lieut.-Col. F. S. Meighen, Commanding. They were just getting under way making soldiers out of the troops I enlisted with, and discipline was quite lax. They at once gave me a week’s leave to come down to New York, and settle up some personal affairs, and I overstayed it five days. All that my company commander said to me when I got back was that I seemed to have picked up Canadian habits very quickly. At a review one day in our training camp, I heard a Major say: “Boys, for God’s sake don’t call me Harry or spit in the ranks. Here comes the General!” We found out eventually that there was a reason for the slackness of discipline. The trouble was that men would enlist to get $1.10 a day without working for it, and would desert as soon as any one made it unpleasant for them. Our officers knew what they were about. Conditions changed instantly we went on ship-board. Discipline tightened up on us like a tie-rope on a colt. We trained in a sort of casual, easy way in Canada from November 4th to the following April. We had a good deal of trouble keeping our battalion up to strength, and I was sent out several times with other “non-coms” on a recruiting detail.