n 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.

Upon being transferred to Camp Funston near Fort Riley in Kansas, Wood
began in the first days of September, 1917, the training of a new
division of raw recruits from the selective draft. He had the
assistance of a nucleus of army officers and some few army men, but
the bulk of the division consisted of new men and of new officers
recently from the officers' training camps. And this work was well on
its way and the division {238} taking form when he received orders to
go to Europe.

It is difficult in this limited space to go into the details of his
work abroad, and most of it in any case was techni