Produced by Geetu Melwani and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net. Produced from page images provided by Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries BILTMORE OSWALD _THE DIARY OF A HAPLESS RECRUIT_ BY J. THORNE SMITH, JR. U.S.N.R.F. _WITH 31 ILLUSTRATIONS IN BLACK-AND-WHITE_ BY RICHARD DORGAN ("_Dick Dorgan_") U.S.N.R.F. [Illustration] NEW YORK FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY PUBLISHERS _Copyright, 1918, by_ _Frederick A. Stokes Company_ _All Rights Reserved_ _Reprinted from_ THE BROADSIDE A JOURNAL FOR THE NAVAL RESERVE FORCE DEDICATION To my buddies, an unscrupulous, clamorous crew of pirates, as loyal and generous a lot as ever returned a borrowed dress jumper with dirty tapes; to numerous jimmy-legs and P.O.'s whose cantankerous tempers have furnished me with much material for this book; and also to a dog, an admirable dog whom I choose to call Mr. Fogerty, with apologies to this dog if in these pages his slave has unwittingly maligned his character or in any way cast suspicion upon his moral integrity. LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS "Biltmore Oswald" _Frontispiece_ "'Do you enlist for foreign service?' he snapped. 'Sure,' I replied, 'it will all be foreign to me'" 2 "The departure was moist" 3 "Hospital apprentice treated me to a shot of Pelham 'hop'" 4 "I feel like a masquerade" 5 "This, I thought, was adding insult to injury" 6 "Mother kept screaming through the wire about my underwear" 7 "A bill from a restaurant for $18.00 worth of past luncheons" 8 "He missed the dirty whites, but I will never be the same" 9 "Fire drill" 10 "This is designed to give us physical poise" 11 "Liberty Party" 14 "Of course I played the game no more" 20 "She was greatly delighted with the Y.M.C.A." 21 "I wasn't so very wrong--just the slight difference between port and present arms" 24 "The first thing he did was to mix poor dear grandfather a drink" 25 "I was tempted to shoot the cartridge out just to make it lighter" 28 "One fourth of the entire Pelham field artillery passed over my body" 29 "The procedure, of course, did not go unnoticed" 32 "This war is going to put a lot of Chinamen out of business" 44 "I stood side-ways, thus decreasing the possible area of danger" 45 "I'm a God-fearing sailor man who is doing the best he can to keep clean" 48 "I took him around and introduced him to the rest of the dogs and several of the better sort of goats" 49 "I resumed my slumber, but not with much comfort" 52 "I lost completely something in the neighborhood of 10,000 men" 53 "Fogerty came bearing down on me in a cloud of dust" 58 "For the most part, however, he sat quietly on my lap and sniffed" 59 "I carried all the flour to-day that was raised last year in the southern section of the State of Montana" 76