The war was over. Oliver October Baxter came through without a scratch. He saw two years of hard fighting with the glorious Canadians; when the United States went in, he gave up his hard-earned commission as first lieutenant and was transferred to the American Army. He learned a great deal about red tape before his transfer was effected, and he discovered to his disgust that he knew a great deal less about war than he might reasonably have been supposed to know after two years of slogging along at it under shot and shell from the German Armies. He had to go back to America and enter a training camp, and even then, to employ his own expression, he had the “devil of a time” getting a commission as second lieutenant. There were so many able young business men and college graduates out for commissions that he just barely managed to scrape through “by the skin of his teeth” in the struggle for honors. The fact that he had had two years of actual experience at the front, part of that time as an officer, did not seem to help him very much with his studies at the “Camp,” nor with the intensive drilling that was supposed to make a soldier of him in three months. Two medals for distinguished service on the field of battle were of absolutely no service to him in the contest that was being waged in the training camp—in fact, he was advised by the major in command that he would better not even speak of them, much less expose them to view. Then, to his intense chagrin, he was sent from one camp to another—a sort of floating officer—finally winding up in a mid-western division that did not go over seas until the spring of 1918, only a few months before the war ended. Once with the Army in France, however, things took a belated change for the better. Far-sighted and fair-minded officers in high places were not slow in transferring him from the camp far behind the lines to a veteran division up in the battle zone. He went through the Argonne and was close on the bloody heels of the German Army when the last guns in the great conflict were fired. He came out a captain.