History of the 305th Field Artillery | Page 2

continued to stare at that blackened desert. We strolled back to J22, our temporary quarters, depressed and doubtful. In the barn-like upper floor, where we had erected As, we gathered about a candle lantern, and in low tones probed the doubtful future. Colonel Doyle, who was to be the regiment's commander from its birth to its final demobilization, was to us that night no more than a name. He lived somewhere on Long Island and would be in camp the next day. At least we had a colonel, but who would be our lieutenant colonel? We had one major, made at Plattsburg. What about the other we needed?
Lieutenant Derby pronounced the first of the regiment's innumerable rumors. It should be said, too, that it's about the only one that ever came true. He had heard in town that Henry L. Stimson, former Secretary of War would come to us as lieutenant colonel.
We gossiped about the unexpected shifting about of our friends. Many that we had expected to have with us had been quietly spirited away. Others, whom we had not hoped to see after Plattsburg, sat in our circle, assigned to the regiment. We had, at the start, found the army full of odd surprises. It gave us all, for the moment, a sense of instability. Our commissioned tables of organization, filled out painstakingly the last night at Plattsburg, would have radically to be revised. Nor was that the only unexpected task. We couldn't forget the black waste, seen from Division Hill. Before many days the men of the first draft would stream in. We would have to share in the miracles that would feed, clothe, and house them; that would give them that vital initial impression they were going to be taken care of in the army. Our doubts increased when we sought our own washing facilities that first night. Who will forget the scouting among piles of lumber, the stumbling over roots and stumps, the escapes from superbly imitated swamps, or the final, triumphant discovery of a single pipe and faucet, surrounded by a mob of violent temper? For more than a thousand officers had reported at that time, and of the twenty-five thousand workmen of the Thompson-Starret Company, some undoubtedly craved that which is next to Godliness. Even then there may have been other pipes at Upton, but for a time that one remained our only discovery; and it had a miserable habit of falling languidly over into the mud unless it was supported by a comrade who had the strength and the will to fight off an army.
Yet we shaved. Yet we contrived to look clean.
"Horrors of war, No. 1, " we labelled our pipe.
So we struggled on, preparing ourselves as best we could for the day when the first enlisted men would arrive. We gazed at night with new interest at the multitude of fires that blazed, crimson, against the forest, surrounded by ragged groups of workmen, who sat for the most part in a sullen and unnatural quiet. For the miracles happened under our eyes. Day by day the wilderness receded, the mushroom city spread. This morning you might walk in a thicket. Tomorrow you would find it cleared land, untidy with the beginnings of buildings. A faith grew that the 305th would have a home.
Side by side with these, other and more intimate miracles developed. Colonel Doyle established a regimental headquarters on a mess table in the mess hall of J1. Whatever stateliness it may have acquired later, headquarters went in those days, as one might say, on hands and knees. Colonel Doyle explained how things should be done, and we did our best to do them right. Already from the pots and pans of J1 Paper Work raised an evil head and sneered at us.
Before we'd got the table really untidy with baskets and typewriters and files and reports, other organizations came enviously in, and established headquarters on that table too. There was a machine gun battalion, the ammunition train, and maybe a bakery company or so. Things became rather too confused for an accurate count. We stole quietly to J20, to the upper floor of which we had already moved our sleeping quarters.
That same afternoon Major Wanvig appeared, bearing under each arm an oblong board sign. One he nailed at the entrance of the building. The other he fastened to a post by the road, so that no one passing could deny the presence he approached.
Each of these signs bore on a white background in striking black strokes:
"Headquarters, 305th F. A. N. A."
We stood about staring.
"That's us-the 305th Field Artillery. Are we going to make it big and successful enough?"
There were at least no visible shirkers, and we had acquired already a belligerent disposition to stand fast for the rights of