Being herded together, seeing the same man on either side of you every day and all day, having to do what you are told day and night, has but limited charms for the independent citizen of America. Thoughts were turned, first backward, to the days when we had been individuals instead of a mite of a cog in a great machine, and then forward, with the inevitable question: how long was it all to last? We would have been homesick, desperately so, but there was no time. A bugle broke our sleep when it was still dark. Another summoned us to a formation before it was physically possible to get dressed, from which we were marched to breakfast. A whistle, followed by the First Sergeant’s “Fall Out”, arrested the first mouthful and told us we would not have time to wash mess kits before policing. Policing was followed by inspection, where the Captain would bawl us out for the condition of those same wretched mess kits. Inspection was followed by physical exercises; physical exercises by foot drill, foot drill by a hike, the hike by mess. In the afternoon we rehearsed the events of the morning. Supper was followed by school, then taps, then bed, then reveille. To-day is a repetition of yesterday, to-morrow will be a repetition of to-day. But to-day we are not going to be bawled out for dirty mess kits, we wash them and are late for policing; the First Sergeant puts us in the kitchen for a week and we learn the meaning of K. P.[A] We are soon repentant and resolve to be on time to formation. This is the school of the Rookie and this is how he learns the impossible. “Take therefore no thought for the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” The next quota of men come into camp; we have graduated; they are the rookies; we are the soldiers; we laugh; they look puzzled. Then came the winter, and what a winter! Arthur Mometer said it was zero hour all the time. Of course he did not know. He was a Rookie, but somehow it didn’t make it any warmer nor the snow less deep. We shovelled snow and froze doing it, we had exercises and we froze doing that, we drilled with the same result. Live horses took the place of those ever-to-be-remembered wooden monstrosities. We groomed them and they bit us. We exercised them and they kicked us. But we got hard and we got health and we became soldiers. Individuality was superseded by discipline.