But then something would happen to blast these budding excitements in Jimmie’s soul.  The red-faced fellow would break into the rhythm of the march.  “For the love of Mike, Pete Casey, can’t you remember those half-steps?  Squad, halt!  Now look here, what’s the matter with you?  Step out and let me show you once more.”  And poor Casey, a meek-faced little man with sloping shoulders, who had been running the elevator in the Chalmers Building up to a week ago, would patiently practise marching without moving, so that the rest of the line could wheel round him as a pivot.  The petty tyrant who scolded at him was determined to have his own way; and Jimmie, who had had to do with many such tyrants in his long years of industrial servitude, was glad when this particular one got mixed up in his orders, and ran his squad into the fountain in the middle of the drill-ground, and some of them marched over the parapet, sliding down into the ice-covered basin below.  The spectators roared, and so did the marchers, and the red-faced man young had to join in, and to come down off his high horse.

The conflict of impulses went on in Jimmie’s soul.  These marching men were the “fools” at whom he had been mocking for something over two years.  They did not look like “fools” he had to admit; on the contrary, they looked, quite capable of deciding what they wanted to do.  And they had decided; they had quit their jobs several weeks in advance of the time when they would be called for the draft, and had set to work to learn the rudiments of the military art, in the hope of thus getting more quickly to France.  Among them were bankers and merchants and real estate dealers, side by side with soda-jerkers and counter-jumpers and elevator-men—­and all taking their orders from an ex-blacksmith’s helper, who had run away to fight in the Philippines.

Jimmie got this last bit of information from a fellow who stood watching; so he realized that here was the thing he had been reading about in the papers—­the new army of the people, that was going forth to make the world safe for democracy!  Jimmy had read such words, and thought them just camouflage, a trap for the “fools”.  But here, a sight of wonder before his eyes, a son of Ashton Chalmers, president of the First National Bank of Leesville, being ordered about and hauled over the coals by an ex-blacksmith’s helper, who happened to know how to shout with the accents of a pile-driver:  “Shoulder humps!  Order humps!  Present humps!”

The squad spread itself out for exercise—­grasping their heavy rifles and swinging them this way and that with desperate violence.  “Swing over head and return, ready, exercise—­one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight—­eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.”  It was no joke making those swings in such quick time; the poor little elevator-man Casey was left hopelessly behind, he could only make half the swing, and then couldn’t get back to place on the count; he would look about, grinning sheepishly, and then fall into time and try again.  Everybody’s face was set, everybody’s breath was coming harder and harder, everybody’s complexion was becoming apoplectic.