PART I
With the Roosevelt Hospital Unit
1917
June 30th. At last, after six weeks' waiting and more or less uncertainty of the time of departure, the call has come in the form of "Confidential Order No. 5" from the War Department. Hustle into uniform and report for duty to Major Hansell at Roosevelt Hospital. We are told to go home and report again Sunday, July 1st.
July 1st. It really looks like business. The courtyard of the Hospital is full of enlisted men having their outfits handed out to them. The whole dispensary is littered with coats, trousers, blankets, etc. The men are having identification discs given them and are packing their kits and rolling blankets. They are really a fine-looking lot of men, and from their general appearance a good many college men are among them.
We are told that we are really going to sail the following morning, and that we must go home, pack and have everything on the pier (Pier 60) before sundown that night. Max is packing my things for me—an officer's trunk, a Gladstone bag and a canvas roll with poncho blankets and a "Gold Medal" canvas cot. We hustle them down to Pier 60 and leave them standing there with a feeling that they will not be seen again, as the whole pier is a mass of motor trucks and boxes of every description. We are to sail on the S.S. "Lapland" on the south side of the pier. The "Baltic" has just docked and is discharging cargo at a tremendous rate. The rattle of the winches is deafening and there are literally hundreds of stevedores at work.
With a silent farewell my baggage is left, and then back to the house where Helen and I lunch and start for Mt. Kisco for the afternoon.
One still feels terribly conscious and queer in uniform. My memory keeps going back to the days when Rob and I enlisted for the Spanish War, a thousand little details keep coming up that I had long forgotten. Camp Alger and its chaos, Newport News, and the transport "Mississippi" and all its horrors.