As I made my final inspection that night, looking out from the companion-way over the rows of close slung hammocks, I wondered what their occupants were thinking; what forms of dear ones were present to their minds; to what homes their thoughts went back--a Harlem flat, a Jersey farmhouse, a great hotel, a tiny pair of rooms in Jersey City; comfortable, well-off American homes; tenements in the foreign districts--each one dear for its memories, each one the home to fight for. Would we have time to train these men into a fighting machine, or would we be thrown in at once to stop the great Hun drive in Flanders, then at its height? How many of us would see these homes, these dear ones again?--But a company commander has little time to indulge in reflections; and thoughts of the morning report, and how to distribute the chow more evenly, and a large budget of orders I had to read, soon chased away everything else. The NESTOR carried the 1st and 2d Bns. and Headquarters Co. of the 311th Inf., a Machine Gun battalion, and Brig. Gen. Dean, our brigade commander, and his staff. Our colonel was in command of the troops on board, such things being below the dignity of general officers. He was in his element; he had an officers’ meeting the first thing, and dished out about 4 square acres of orders to be read and put into effect at once. [Illustration: 1st Platoon, Flavigny, France, 1919.] Now no one knows better than I how many orders you men received, and how it was often beyond human power to obey all of them. But I call any company commander to witness that we got them coming and going. The Co. Cmdr. is the one man who can’t pass the buck on responsibility. We had to take the bushels of orders we received, eliminate those utterly impossible, select from those remaining what seemed essential and what we thought the Major and Colonel would deem essential, and then get those things done by the company--that is, issue orders to the 1st Sgt. for details, Supply Sgt. for supplies, Mess Sgt. for mess, officers for drill and instruction, company clerk for paper work, and then see to it that the whole is carried out. And then one usually amasses a balling out for something or other that he has left out. One of these orders was the censorship order, of which we had heard so much. Instead of having all letters censored at post offices by clerks, some genius had decided to follow the British plan of having officers censor their own men’s mail. Thus at one brilliant stroke a situation was created which embarrassed men and officers alike, imposed an irksome and continual task on over-burdened officers, delayed the mail, and was in every way sweet incense in the nostrils of the little tin gods of the red tape; the exponents of the theory of How Not to Do It.