“Well, I’ll be shot if that don’t beat any thing I ever heard of,” said Morris. “Suppose we should quietly ignore all such senseless rules—what then?”
“If you have any idea of doing that, you had better make an excuse to get away from here before you put on the uniform,” replied Enoch, with a laugh that spoke volumes. “They will haze you till you can’t sleep o’ nights.”
“How will they do it?”
“O, there are plenty of ways. They are never at a loss for something, and they have the faculty of doing the very thing you would rather they would not do. If they find that any particular way of hazing bothers you more than another, they will use it every chance they get.”
“The meanest of all the mean ways of hazing is the second exercise in ‘setting up,’” observed Jones. “My back aches yet whenever I think of it. You see,” he added, addressing himself to Dale, “when I first came here I kicked against the rules, just as you show a disposition to do. I couldn’t see why a boy who wore two blue stripes around his arm should be so high up in the world that I couldn’t speak to him if I wanted to, and one day I addressed a friendly remark to one of the corporals. Great Caesar! I thought he would take my head off, he snapped me up so spitefully. After he quit jawing me I thought he had got through, but he hadn’t—not by a long shot. A few days after that, he drilled a squad of us in ‘setting up,’ and I went through the exercise a hundred and eighty times before that little fice of a corporal gave the command ‘three.’”
“It means ‘stop,’” replied Lester, who had also had some very disagreeable experience with a corporal to whom, he was determined, he would not show a proper amount of respect. “It is the same as ‘rest,’ after a squad or company stacks arms.”
“What sort of a drill is it, any way?” asked Barry. “Is it so very hard on a fellow?”
“You do it a hundred and eighty times without stopping, and then you can answer the question for yourself,” was Enoch’s response. “I can give it to you in the language of the tactics. The commands are: ‘Second, Exercise. Raise the arms from the sides, extended to their full length, till the hands meet above the head, palms of the hands to the front, fingers pointing upward, thumbs locked, right thumb in front, the shoulders pressed back. (Two.) Bend over till the hands, if possible, touch the ground, keeping the arms and knees straight. (Three.) Resume the position of a soldier.’ Try it a few times after you have taken your overcoat off, and see how funny it is.”
Jones and Lester Brigham both gave it as their private opinion that Barry would learn to his entire satisfaction that there was nothing “funny” in it.