You didn’t pose, self-conscious of your lot, Or speak of what might be or might have been; You always thought heroics simply rot, And so you merely wore your old-time grin. Kilmer had first joined the Officers’ Reserve Training corps. He soon resigned from this. In less than three weeks after the United States entered the war he enlisted as a private in the Seventh Regiment, National Guard, New York. His own statement was: “I haven’t time for Plattsburg: had too much work to finish, but I had to get in.” The Regiment was mustered into the Federal Service on July 15, 1917; and Kilmer expected to go to training camp somewhere in the South for a couple of months, then to be sent to “France, or Russia, or Cuba, or Mexico or somewhere else.” He had a great distaste for going to Russia, because he disliked cold climates. He one time expressed a decided aversion to a book commonly held to be quite good. When asked what was the matter with it, he denounced it as being about “one of those cold countries.” It would not, of course, have been Kilmer had he not found elation in the distinguished and picturesque character of the crack regiment to which he belonged. “We are the oldest outfit in the Guard--Lafayette reviewed us in 1824 and Joffre two weeks ago.” If you had not seen the dress uniform of “the Seventh” you heard all about it at lunch. And “hard newspaper man” as he was, he became even “harder” now. “Can’t hurt my feelings,” he wrote requesting a friend to be quite frank with him. “Hard military character, seriously considering acquisition of habit of chewing tobacco.” Shortly before the Seventh left New York for Spartanburg, South Carolina, Kilmer was transferred, at his own request, to the 165th Infantry, U. S. A., formerly the famous old “Fighting Sixty-ninth,” New York, a unit of the Rainbow Division, assembled at Camp Mills, Mineola, Long Island. He was most particular to impress upon his friends the point that he had been transferred at his own volition. I do not know that he ever said so, in so many words, but I gathered from him the impression that a considerable part of his motive in having himself transferred was occasioned by his belief that the 165th would go sooner than the Seventh to the battlefield. Then, too, as we know, he was “half Irish”; and an Irish-American regiment doubtless was a powerful magnet to him. In the 165th the people he liked best of all were “the wild Irish boys who left Ireland a few years ago, some of them to escape threatened conscription, and travelled about the country in gangs, generally working on the railroads. They have delightful songs that have never been written down, but sung in vagabonds’ camps and country jails. I have got some of the songs down and hope to get more--‘The Boston Burglar’--‘Sitting in My Cell All Alone’--they are a fine, a veritable Irish-American folk-lore.”