nize at Funston on the 10th of August--raw men from office, farm
and shop. They found there the skeletons of so-called regular
regiments--regiments which were regular only in name; that is to {250}
say, there were only a very few regular officers of experience and a
limited number of men recently recruited under the old system. On the
24th General Wood reviewed the whole division. On November 1st it was
ready, trained, equipped and in condition both from the physical and
the military point of view to go abroad. And when the armistice was
signed on November 11th an advance contingent had already gone to
France to prepare for its reception. About the middle of September the
British and French Senior Mission--three officers of each
army--reported at Funston and remained there for six weeks. And upon
their departure on November 1st after a long, rigid and critical
examination of the division they stated that in their opinion it was
by far the best prepared and trained division that they had seen in
this country.

Here again appears the same quality that made McKinley appoint Wood
Governor-General of Cuba; that made Roosevelt send him to organize the
apparently unorganizable part of the Philippine Islands; that caused
the French to award him a very high order of the Legion of Honor;
{251} that made the State of Kansas take him into its family as a
citizen; that led the generals of Europe to hope he would come and be
one of them; and finally that caused many hundreds of thousands of his
own countrymen to follow him and support him in his plans to prepare
the people of his nation for what eventually came upon them.

With the signing of the armistice and the victorious ending of the war
Wood's activities did not cease. With characteristic energy he began
the work of looking out for the soldiers who would soon be demobilized
from the army and thrown upon their own resources. He saw how changed
the outlook of many of these men would be. He saw the troubles in
which thousands--actually millions--of them would be involved, not
through any fault of their own, not through any fault of the
Government or of army life, but because they had undergone certain
mental changes incident to training, to active service, and hence
could not again return to the point they had reached when their
military service began.

He, therefore, instituted in Chicago, where as Commander of the
Central Department he had his {252} headquarters, as well as i