Camp Hooker was an astonishing and spectacular growth, suggesting "A
Mining Town in 1870--The Second Week." It was a thing of wooden shacks
and whitish-gray tents, connected by a pattern of roads, with hard tan
drill-grounds fringed with trees. Here and there stood green Y.M.C.A.
houses, unpromising oases, with their muggy odor of wet flannels and
closed telephone-booths--and across from each of them there was usually
a canteen, swarming with life, presided over indolently by an officer
who, with the aid of a side-car, usually managed to make his detail a
pleasant and chatty sinecure.
Up and down the dusty roads sped the soldiers of the quartermaster
corps, also in side-cars. Up and down drove the generals in their
government automobiles, stopping now and then to bring unalert details
to attention, to frown heavily upon captains marching at the heads of
companies, to set the pompous pace in that gorgeous game of showing off
which was taking place triumphantly over the entire area.
The first week after the arrival of Anthony's draft was filled with a
series of interminable inoculations and physical examinations, and with
the preliminary drilling.
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