Conscript 2989: Experiences of a Drafted ManCrump, Irving
History
Conscript 2989: Experiences of a Drafted Man
Crump, Irving
Military training camps -- United States; United States. Army -- Military life; World War, 1914-1918
If there is one thing that I want to remember more than anything else
about this Conscript Camp it is the spectacle I witnessed and took part
in this evening.
Fancy if you can Tower Hill with its big headquarters building snuggled
in among the scattered and gaunt pines, the tall, ungainly water-tank
propped up on all too spindly-looking stilts. On top of this a single
figure thrown in bold relief by the golden yellow light of a big
watch-fire, beating time with his baton, and below him, clothing the
slopes of the hill five thousand men, his chorus, thundering forth
across the starlit night “Columbia the Gem of the Ocean.” That chorus
was wonderful; that crowd was wonderful; everything about it was
wonderful.
We were all singing; thousands of fellows in khaki, some snuggled in
their big army overcoats, some puffed out like pouter pigeons with the
sweaters they had piled on under their tunics against the cold chill of
night. Intermingled were the lumber jacks and labourers from the
civilian camp, most of them in gay mackinaws and caps; with now and then
an officer immaculately clad in clean cut uniform, or a Y. M. C. A. man
in grey-green suit with red circle and triangle gleaming in the
firelight. And how well they could sing; I have never heard a more
stirring chorus and as we raised our voices loud and clear shivery
thrills raced up and down our spines, and we were stirred to the highest
pitch of patriotic fervor. Indeed, there were some among us who could
find no better way of expressing the emotion that swelled within save by
tears. They cried. I was one of them.
“America” and “Dixie” and “Maryland” followed and every one produced its
own thrill and its own heartache. Never was there anything more
stirring, Never was there anything finer. We sang till our voices were
husky and the great chorus surged loud and clear across the night, until
it must have echoed against the crags of the Rhine and caused the Hun to
shudder.
Then the breaking up of the big meeting, when groups detached themselves
and wandered out of the fitful flicker of the dying firelight into the
misty blue blackness of the night, still singing. Out through the
streets of the camp we tramped, stepping to the cadence of our own
songs. We were all happy, very, very happy and draft or no draft, down
in our hearts we all knew that we were in the very place we were meant
to be, and we were doing the very things that we should do, and that
when the time came we would do other and greater things with as much
eagerness and enthusiasm as we had sung up there on Tower Hill to-night.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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