Social problems -- Fiction; War stories; World War, 1914-1918 -- Fiction
As soon as Jimmie was able to work, they took him to the part of the
camp where a motor-cycle division was training. Here was a big
repair-shop, with plenty of damaged machines upon which he might
display his skill. He did not know the particular engine they used
here, but he soon learned the secrets of it, and satisfied the
officers in charge that he knew how to take one apart and put it
together again, to replace and mend tyres, to clean ball-bearings
and true crooked rims. “You're all right,” they said. “And you're
needed like the devil over there. You won't have to wait long.”
There was a platform where the trains came into the camp, and every
few hours now there came a long train to be loaded with men. Jimmie
got his notice, and packed his kit and answered roll call and took
his place; at sundown of the next day he was detrained at a
“mobilization-camp”--another huge city, described in the cautious
military fashion as “Somewhere in New Jersey”, though everybody
within a hundred miles knew its exact location. Here was a port,
created for the purposes of war, with docks and wharves where the
fleets of transports were loaded with supplies and troops. The
vessels sailed in fleets, carrying thirty or forty thousand men at
once. From the port of New York alone there was going out a fleet
like this every week--the answer of America to the new drive of the
Hun.
One met here, not merely the fighting-men, but the forces of all the
complicated service behind the lines: gangs of lumbermen from the
far North-west, who were to fell the forests of France and make them
into railroad-ties and timber for trenches; railway-men, miners, and
construction-gangs, engineers and signalmen, bridge-builders and
road-makers, telephone-linemen and operators, the drivers of forty
thousand motor-cars and of five thousand locomotives; bakers and
cooks, menders of shoes and of clothing, farmers to till the soil of
France, and doctors and nurses to tend its sick and wounded. There
was nothing which the skill and knowledge of a nation of a hundred
million people had to offer that was not gathered into this vast
encampment. All the youngest and keenest were here, eager to do
their part, laughing at danger, tingling with excitement, on tip-toe
with curiosity and delight. Jimmie Higgins, watching them, found his
doubts melting like an April snow-storm. How could any man see this
activity and not be caught up in it? How could he be with these
laughing boys and not share their mood?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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