“Done anything!” challenged Bob. “Don’t you call that drill we went through yesterday anything?”
“Just a little setting up exercise, and some marching to get you to know your hay foot from your straw foot,” commented the tall lad. “If you’re going to kick about that the second day in camp what will happen in about a week?”
“Oh, I’m not kicking,” hastily said Bob. “In fact, I’m too lame and sore to kick. And my arm feels like a boil.”
“Anti-typhus germs,” explained Ned. “You’ll be a whole lot worse before you’re better. We have to have two more injections, I understand.”
The rousing notes of the bugle, “rousing” in a double sense, again sounded, and, not without considerable grumbling and growling, in which even Jerry, by the look on his face at least, seemed to join, the boys got up and prepared for another day in camp—their second.
The young volunteers, with a lot of other recruits, had reached the camp ground the day before, but there was so much confusion, so many new arrivals, and such a general air of orderly disorder about the place, that the impressions Ned, Bob, and Jerry received were mixed.
Camp Dixton was situated in one of the Southern states, and was laid out on a big plain at the foot of some hills, which, as they rose farther to the west, became sizable mountains. The plain which had, until within a short time of the laying out of the cantonments, been several large farms, consisted of level ground, with a few places where there were low rounded hills and patches of wood. It was an ideal location for a camp, giving opportunity for drills and sham battles over as great a diversity of terrain as might be found in Flanders or France.
As to the camp itself, it was typical of many that have since sprung up all over the United States to care for the large army, or armies, that are constantly being raised. And the building of Camp Dixton, like the making of all the others, had been little short of marvelous. On what had been, a few months before, a series of farms, there was now a military city.
The place was laid out like a model city. The barracks for the soldiers were, of course, made of rough wood, and few of them were painted, but there was time enough for that. A great level, center space had been set aside as a parade ground, and in the midst of this was the division headquarters. North and south of the parade ground were the long rows of “streets” lined with the wooden buildings, some of which were sleeping quarters, some cook houses and others places where the officers lived.