For a moment he wavered. Surely it would have been more sensible to wait till later in the season, when the consequences of a plunge overboard would be less distressing! But Jimmie remembered the armies, locked in their grip of death; never would despatch-riders need their motor-cycles more urgently than now! Also Jimmie remembered the sergeant at the recruiting-office. “You understand, you're under military discipline now!” He set his jaw in a grim resolve. The “subs” be damned, he would go and do his part! Already he felt the thrill of his responsibility in this mighty hour of history; he was a military man, with a stern duty to do, with the destinies of nations depending upon his behaviour! CHAPTER XIX JIMMIE HIGGINS PUTS ON KHAKI I There were seven fellows who boarded the train that evening, under the temporary charge of a blacksmith from the near by country. At seven o'clock next morning they presented their papers at the entrance-gate of the training-camp, and under the escort of a soldier were marched down the main street, hanging on to their bundles and suit-cases, and staring about them at the sights. It was a city inhabited by some forty thousand men, on a site which a year ago had been waste scrub-land. Long rows of wooden buildings stretched in every direction--barracks, dining-rooms, study-rooms, offices, store-houses--with great stretches of exercise and training-grounds between. Just to see this city, with its swarming population of young men, all in uniform, erect, eager, well-set-up and vivid with health, every man of them busy, and every man seemingly absorbed in his job--that alone was a worth-while experience. It was a new kind of city--a city without a loafer, without a drunkard, without a parasite. The seven working-men from Leesville felt suddenly slouchy and disgraced, with their ill-fitting civilian clothes and their miscellaneous bundles and suitcases. The first thing they did with the new arrivals was to make them clean, to fumigate and vaccinate them. In a Socialist local one meets all sorts of eccentrics, the lunatic-fringe of the movement, and so it happened that Jimmie had listened to a tirade against the diabolical practice of inoculation, which caused more deadly diseases than it was supposed to prevent. But the medical officers of this camp did not stop to ask Jimmie's conclusions on that vital subject; they just told him to roll up the sleeve of his left arm, and proceeded to wipe his skin clean and scratch it with a needle.