At the first recruiting meeting Stanley volunteered his services by walking down the aisle of the church at the first invitation.  The recruiting officer motioned to him to be seated, and that he would see him after the meeting.

Stanley waited patiently until every person was gone, and then timidly said, “And now, sir, will you please tell me what I am to do?”

The recruiting officer, a dapper little fellow, very pompous and important, turned him down mercilessly.  Stanley was dismayed.  He wandered idly out of the church and was about to start off on his four-mile walk to the Stopping House when a sudden impulse seized him and he followed the recruiting agent to the house where he was staying.

He overtook him just as he was going into the house, and, seizing him by the arm, cried, “Don’t you see, sir, that you must take me?  I am strong and able—­I tell you I am no coward—­what have you against me, I want to know?”

The recruiting officer hesitated.  Confound it all!  It is a hard thing to tell a man that he is not exactly right in the head.

But he did not need to say it, for Stanley beat him to it.  “I know what’s wrong,” he said; “you think I’m not very bright—­I am not, either.  But don’t you see, war is an elemental sort of thing.  I can do what I’m told—­and I can fight.  What does it matter if my head is not very clear on some things which are easy to you?  And don’t you see how much I want to go?  Life has not been so sweet that I should want to hold on to it.  The young men here do not want to go, for they are having such a good time.  But there is nothing ahead of me that holds me back.  Can’t you see that, sir?  Won’t you pass me on, anyway, and let me have my chance?  Give me a trial; it’s time enough to turn me down when I fail at something.  Won’t you take me, sir?”

The recruiting officer sadly shook his head.  Stanley watched him in an agony of suspense.  Here was his way out—­his way of escape from this body of death that had hung over him ever since he could remember.  He drew nearer to the recruiting officer,—­“For God’s sake, sir, take me!” he cried.

Then the recruiting officer pulled himself together and grew firm and commanding.  “I won’t take you,” he said, “and that’s all there is about it.  This is a job for grown-up men and men with all their wits about them.  You would faint at the sight of blood and cry when you saw the first dead man.”

In a few weeks another recruiting meeting was held, and again Stanley presented himself when the first invitation was given.  The recruiting officer remembered him, and rather impatiently told him to sit down.  Near the front of the hall sat the German-American storekeeper of the neighboring town, who had come to the meeting to see what was going on, and had been interrupting the speaker with many rude remarks; and when Stanley, in his immaculate suit of gray check, his gray spats, and his eyeglass, passed by where he was sitting, it seemed as if all his slumbering hatred for England burst at once into flame!