Indeed speculation on the subject is not likely to produce much profit. It is only of importance in the present place as illustrating again the make-up of the subject of this biographical sketch. He took no steps other than those regularly and properly open to him to secure service. He attempted no roundabout methods. He kept his own counsel and followed his old maxim of "Do it and don't talk about it." His requests for reasons for denying him of all men the right to fight for his country on the battle line made through proper channels--never otherwise--produced no answers in any case and to this day the whole amazing episode is entirely without explanation. Meantime the man's characteristic energy and thoroughness produced extraordinary results in other fields. In his short sojourn in Charleston it was his duty to select and prepare at once a certain {236} number of camps, or cantonments as they came to be called, within the jurisdiction of the South Eastern Department. And this he proceeded to do with great rapidity. Not only were all the sites he selected passed without exception, but they proved to be in every instance safe, sanitary and sufficient for the purpose. This was no easy matter with almost every town and city in the South sending delegations to him to ask that it be selected as the site of one of the camps, with the prodigious amount of political influence brought to bear from all sides and with the necessity of offending nobody, of making all work towards one end--the immediate preparation for homes for the men who were to make the new army. It was all so skillfully handled that there is not a place in the South of any size which has not sounded and does not sound the praises of General Wood. He selected the camps and made them with that experience and knowledge that were his because of the fact that he was an army officer and a doctor who had done much the same thing and had had much the same work in Cuba and the Philippines. {237} One would expect something of the sort from any able man with such preparation, but one would not expect such a man to leave the Department with the extraordinary popularity and the multitude of expressions of good will and affection which Wood carried away with him after these few months of work. In the midst of the journeyings to and fro to look over possible sites and all the work entailed in preparing the camps he found time to supervise the three officers' training camps already mentioned, which were carried out upon the lines of the earlier ones with the aid of the Officers' Training Camps Association.