colleges and
universities in the United States the establishment of several
experimental military training camps {209} for students. These camps
were to be placed one on the historic field of Gettysburg and the
other at the Presidio of Monterey, California. The former opened on
July 7th and closed on August 15th, and the latter extended from July
1st to August 8th. In all 222 students took this training, 159 at
Gettysburg and 68 in Monterey.

It was the first trial, and it was a very small and insignificant
response. Indeed it gives a good idea of the importance in which
military preparedness was held in this country at that moment--
100,000,000 inhabitants; 222 volunteers.

Those were the days when the people of this land and many others were
hard at work upon commercial pursuits and when for amusement the world
and his wife danced tango to ragtime music. So-called alarmists cried
"Look out for war!" Major Du Maurier of the British army wrote a play
called "An Englishman's Home," which startled and puzzled Englishmen
for a while, but could not carry an audience for one week in this
country. Nobody took any interest in what his neighbor was doing, to
say nothing of what Germany or any other countries were planning.

{210}

Yet Wood was not discouraged. He was started on a long campaign and he
knew he had to prepare to prepare. Furthermore the men in the
universities who could see ahead came forward in his support and in
support of the idea. Four years later President Drinker of Lehigh
University wrote of the amazing success of the movement: "We owe it
largely to Major-General Wood's farsightedness as a man of affairs and
to his great qualities as a soldier and patriot, that our country was
awakened to the need of preparedness, and this beginning of military
training in our youth was due wholly to his initiative." [Footnote:
_National Service Magazine_.]

Small as the beginning was it was a plant with the germ of strength in
it, since at this first camp in Gettysburg the members formed then in
1913 the Society of the National Reserve Corps of the United States.
Wood at once cooperated with this slender offshoot and gave it all the
support in his power. He sent letters as Chief of Staff of the Regular
Army to college presidents at the same time that the president of the
new Corps did so--both suggesting an advisory committee to {211}
assist the government in the encouragement and practical advancement
of the traini