the University during the years 1917 and 1918. An analysis of
the figures given on the service flag showed that of the total 7,669
were known to be actually in service while 2,747 were in the University,
enrolled in the army and navy units of the Student Army Training Corps.
As these men were in uniform and regularly inducted in the two branches
of service and would all have been sent overseas within a short time had
the war continued, their names must be included.

Such are the bare statistics of Michigan's part in the fight for the
principles which have made America what she is. The war came slowly to
the University. During the years just preceding the entrance of the
United States there was probably no part of the world as little touched
by the actualities overseas as the mid-western portion of the United
States. The seaboard states felt it, in their commerce and other
contacts with Europe, far more than the vast central region, which had
been favored with an unexampled wave of prosperity. So while America was
at peace, the war spirit in the University was for the most part latent,
far more so than in many of the universities of the East, where the
implications and the realities of the war, which always come more
vividly through personal relationships, led to more vigorous preparatory
measures and many enlistments for service in the English, Canadian, and
French armies.

The lessons the struggle on the Marne, in Flanders and Gallipoli was
teaching were by no means unheeded, however, and a strong movement for
military training in the University developed as early as November,
1914, when a petition signed by fifty members of the Faculty, including
the Deans of the Medical, Engineering, and Law Schools, for the
establishment of a military course in the University was presented to
the Regents. This had no immediate effect, however, and it was not until
the University Senate took similar action a year later that the movement
was really inaugurated. The opinion was as yet by no means unanimous in
favor of the plan, for a straw vote of the Faculty showed 85 for and 55
against the general principle of military training for students, with a
somewhat smaller majority in favor of making it compulsory. A similar
vote among the students showed 1,040 for the plan and 932 against it. In
March, 1916, the Regents took favorable action on the project, though
the course was not compulsory. Several military companies and a naval
reser