THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 



435 



of the results of the training of the Na- 

 tional Army. 



It must be added, in order to keep the 

 balance true, that the dragnet of draft 

 sometimes brings to the camp men who 

 fall below the standards of the American 

 city or country life. One company re- 

 cruited from the hills of Virginia has 30 

 men in 150 who cannot read and write; 

 another eleven. Here is the other side 

 of the picture. But no sooner do these 

 men settle in their companies than they 

 are sent to school — a long-deferred op- 

 portunity — and each night, after the drills 

 of the day are ended, they are taught by 

 one of their officers the rudiments of 

 reading and writing. As a national asset, 

 the broadening and educational develop- 

 ment sure to result from military train- 

 ing, combined with the mixing with folks 

 from other sections of our country, will 

 outweigh any temporary economic loss. 

 One company of the Virginia brigade 

 mustered a recruit who had never seen an 

 electric light or a trolley system till he 

 joined. 



Bear in mind that the sanitary stand- 

 ards of, the army are the highest. Here 

 is another educational feature incidental 

 to the training of the selected men in the 

 cantonments. From the moment the re- 

 cruit arrives in camp, from the moment 

 he is ordered to take a bath before ap- 

 pearing before the surgeon for his medi- 

 cal examination, he is drilled in the de- 

 tails of personal hygiene. In this age of 

 universal hot and cold running water in 

 all cities, one is prone to forget that in 

 some of the rural districts the old-fash- 

 ioned Saturday night weekly bath is still 

 the custom; and, if any other more ur- 

 gent matter displaces the bath hour, ablu- 

 tions are postponed a week. 



PUTTING PRIDE; INTO THE) HILL COUNTRY 

 RECRUIT 



The hill districts of Virginia are no- 

 toriously backward in educational facili- 

 ties and all that follows in the wake of 

 schools — instruction in the care of the 

 teeth, the person, the home — and recruits 

 from the feud counties are at first be- 

 wildered by the many exactions making 

 for cleanliness in a cantonment ; but con- 

 tact with other clean, smart well set-up 

 soldiers teaches the new recruit the de- 



sirable results of cleanliness. The prov- 

 erb that "cleanliness is next to godliness" 

 is not without its psychological justifica- 

 tion, and as an aid to the implanting of 

 discipline it is second only to the refine- 

 ments of the drill exercises. 



As a corollary of this cleanliness of 

 person, the new soldier learns to keep 

 his barracks, his bunk, his kitchen as spick 

 and span as a New England home after 

 spring cleaning. The civilian having only 

 the slightest knowledge of the duties of 

 a soldier knows that a dirty rifle is a mili- 

 tary offense, but few understand that the 

 barracks, the soldier's home, the kitchen, 

 the lavatory, and the grounds are in- 

 spected each day so that dirt in the sense 

 of grime is foreign to the soldier's exist- 

 ence. The men quickly come to under- 

 stand the virtue of keeping themselves 

 and their homes free from dirt, and it 

 is certain they will carry this knowledge 

 back to their home communities when 

 their period of soldiering is over. 



DOWN IN THE VALLEY OE DESPONDENCY 



Just that break with his home com- 

 munity is the hardest trial the new se- 

 lected man has to bear. In a night he is 

 torn from his family, his father, his 

 mother, often his wife and children, and 

 translated to an environment at once 

 strange and difficult. Habit is the strong- 

 est element in the lives of most men, and 

 in wrenching him from his daily habits 

 of eating, sleeping, working, playing, 

 meeting his friends, expressing his opin- 

 ions, we play havoc with the recruit's 

 world. He arrives in the cantonment a 

 prey to acute homesickness. Many of 

 these men struggle to hold back the tears 

 the first night in camp — some do not 

 wholly succeed — and the first few days 

 of army life seem to promise nothing but 

 misery. 



What adds to this gloomy outlook, re- 

 ducing the selected soldier to a physical 

 state below his mental plane, is the ty- 

 phoid inoculation and vaccination. From 

 personal knowledge, the writer can pro- 

 nounce the typhoid inoculation, especially 

 the second dose, a most depressing ex- 

 perience. Add the pain and discomfort 

 of an infected vaccinated arm to this con- 

 dition, and the morale of the soldier falls 

 to the vanishing point. Here is the time 



