When Lieutenant Colonel Reed returned, he called a meeting of his staff and the Battalion and Company Commanders, and told them such details as were then obtainable of the great honor which had come to the regiment they loved. There were present Major William J. Donovan, Major William B. Stacom, Major Timothy J. Moynahan, Captain George McAdie, Captain Thomas T. Reilley, Captain William Kennelly, Captain James A. McKenna, Jr., Captain Alexander E. Anderson, Captain Michael A. Kelly, Captain James J. Archer, Captain James G. Finn, Captain Van S. Merle-Smith, Captain John P. Hurley, and Captain William T. Doyle. They heard the good news with undisguised delight and at once proceeded to prepare for the necessary intensive training. But as great as was their delight, it was clouded with one regret. And that regret was felt also by every enlisted man. They all knew that the Regiment had been the first selected to go abroad not because of what it had done in the Civil War, nor because it was representative of what was best in the citizenship of our nation’s greatest city. It had been selected, after a long and searching examination of the military resources of the country, because its record in the most recent important test—the Mexican Border Campaign—showed it to be the best trained and equipped fighting unit that America possessed. And the man who had done more than all others to bring the Regiment to this point, the man who during the long strenuous months on the Border had moulded it after his own ideal pattern of soldierly efficiency—that man was absent from the conference at which was announced the momentous news. There was not an officer in the conference room, there was not an enlisted man on the drill floor that day, who did not think of Colonel William N. Haskell—of the joy with which he would lead his beloved Regiment into the Great War, of the joy with which that Regiment would follow him across the ocean and over the parapet and through the German lines to the Kaiser’s palace. There was not an officer or man who did not recall his last words when he was ordered to another duty “I want to lead the 69th Regiment into a fight.” Colonel Haskell was absent from this historic conference. He had been lent, not given to the Regiment, and now the Government claimed his valuable services to solve some of the problems of the new National Army. But he was present in spirit—in the thoughts of everyone in the building and in the fitness he had given to the Regiment’s personnel.