Milk-sops and peace-at-any-price advocates may as well turn their attention away from West Point. These ultra-peaceable ones, who long for the promotion of peace through the abolition of all armies, have at hand an experiment that can be carried out only on a smaller scale.
Let these peace-at-any-price agitators, in a given community, set about to stamp out crime by abolishing the police force! An army is merely a force of international policemen.
* * * * * *
In the last days of August the furloughed new second class returned. The young men, after reporting at the adjutant's office at the required hour, formed and marched to camp, still in "cit." clothes.
First and third class men rushed out to receive and congratulate the returned travelers, while the plebes stood shyly by. Their welcome was not wanted. Then the second class men disappeared into their tents. They were out again, quickly enough, in white ducks and the cadet gray blouses. They had taken up the cadet life for two years more. In the afternoon these second class men swelled the ranks of the battalion and went through, with all the old-time fervor, the grand old ceremony of dress parade.
That night came the "Show." This annual show at the end of
August may be either the Camp Illumination or the Color Line
Entertainment. This year the class presidents had asked for the
latter.
As soon as dark came on, the Color Line—the central line through cadet camp—blazed out with lights. Soon after the band began to play gayly. Hundreds of visitors, most of them women, and the majority quite young women, flocked to camp. Along the color line the guns of the battalion were stacked. Over the center of the line the colors of the country and the cadet colors were draped with beautiful effect. Cadets of the three upper classes escorted the visitors through. The plebes stood by their own tents, answering when spoken to, which was not often.
After the band had played several selections the musicians moved up before a hastily constructed stage. Plays or musical farces, written and acted by cadets, are often presented. In Dick's plebe summer, however, the choice had been for a minstrel show.
Half an hour before the opening of the performance thirty of the cadets vanished to a big dressing tent behind the stage.
Before the stage hundreds of seats had been arranged. Every cadet who escorted ladies was privileged to sit with them. Cadets who "stagged" it were expected to stand. All of the plebes were in this number.