Jimmie was in quarantine, not allowed to go out of camp on account of his typhoid and other vaccinations, There was enough about the place to have interested him; but, alas, he became suddenly very sick, and was terrified to realize that the opponent of inoculation must have been right.  His health had been undermined for ever, he would suffer from a dozen obscure diseases!  He went to the hospital, miserable in body and still more miserable in mind; but in a couple of days he began to feel better, and listened to the nurses, who told him cheerfully that everybody felt that way for a bit.  Then he got up, and had several free days in which to complete his recovery—­days which he spent in wandering about the camp, watching the fascinating sights.

It was like a circus with hundreds of rings.  The drilling and marching he had seen in the Leesville square were here going on wholesale.  Hundreds of groups were being put through squad-drill and the manual, while other groups were having special kinds of exercises—­climbing up walls, digging trenches, making roads, shooting at targets.  It rained every other day, and the ground was a morass, but no one paid the least attention to that; the men came in plastered with mud, and steaming like lard-vats.  They seemed to enjoy it; nothing ever interfered with their bantering and jokes.

Jimmie watched them with alternating moods of curiosity and horror; for the things that were done here brought the war, with its infinite and multiform wickedness, before his very eyes.  Here was a group of men being taught to advance under fire; crawling on their bellies on the ground, jumping from one hummock to another, flinging themselves down and pretending to fire.  A man in front, supposed to have a machine-gun, was shouting when he had “got” them.  Now they unslung their little trenching-tools, and began to burrow themselves like wood-chucks into the ground.  “Dig, you sons o’ guns, dig!” the officer would shout.  “Keep your head down, Smith!  Make the dirt fly!  Put the jazz into it!  That’s the stuff!”

Jimmie had never watched football practice, so he had no conception of the efforts to which men could be goaded by “coaching”.  It was abhorrent—­yet also it was fascinating, the spell of it got hold of him.  He saw what these men were doing; they were learning to act in masses, to act with paralyzing and terrific force.  Whatever it was they did, they did with the smash of a battering-ram.  You saw the fire in their eyes, the grim, set look on their faces; you knew that they were not going to war with any hesitations or divided minds.

You would move over a rise in the ground, and come upon a bunch of them at bayonet-practice.  You didn’t require imagination to get the hang of this; they had dummies made of leather, and they rushed at these figures, hacking, stabbing—­and here was the most amazing part of it, shouting with rage.  Actually the officers taught them to yell, to snarl, to work up their feelings to a fury!  It was blood-curdling—­Jimmie turned away from it sick.  It was just what he had been arguing for three years and a half—­you had to make yourself into a wild beast in order to go to war!