.

The water was bad this morning when every man was thirsty. It had been
boiled for safety and was served warm and tasted of disinfectants. The
breakfast had been oatmeal and salty bacon swimming in congealed grease.
The "boy" in the soldier's body was very low indeed that morning. The
"man" with his disillusioned eyes had come to the front. Of course this
was nothing like the hardships they would have to endure later, but it
was enough for the present to their unaccustomed minds, and harder
because they were doing nothing that seemed worth while--just marching
about and doing sordid duties when they were all eager for the fray and
to have it over with. They had begun to see that they were going to have
to learn to wait and be patient, to obey blindly; they--who never had
brooked commands from any one, most of them, not even from their own
parents. They had been free as air, and they had never been tied down to
certain company. Here they were all mixed up, college men and foreign
laborers, rich and poor, cultured and coarse, clean and defiled, and it
went pretty hard with them all. They had come, a bundle of prejudices and
wills, and they had first to learn that every prejudice they had been
born with or cultivated, must be given up or laid aside. They were not
their own. They belonged to a great machine. The great perfect conception
of the army as a whole had not yet dawned upon them. They were occupied
with unpleasant details in the first experimental stages. At first the
discomforts seemed to rise and obliterate even the great object for which
they had come, and discontent sat upon their faces.

Off beyond the drill-field whichever way they looked, there were barracks
the color of the dust, and long stark roads, new and rough, the color of
the barracks, with jitneys and trucks and men like ants crawling
furiously back and forth upon them all animated by the same great
necessity that had brought the men here. Even the sky seemed yellow like
the dust. The trees were gone except at the edges of the camp, cut down
to make way for more barracks, in even ranks like men.

Out beyond the barracks mimic trenches were being dug, and puppets hung
in long lines for mock enemies. There were skeleton bridges to cross,
walls to scale, embankments to jump over, and all, everything, was that
awful olive-drab color till the souls of the new-made soldiers cried out
within them for a touch of scarlet or green or blue to relieve the dr