Those were the days when the people of this land and many others were hard at work upon commercial pursuits and when for amusement the world and his wife danced tango to ragtime music. So-called alarmists cried "Look out for war!" Major Du Maurier of the British army wrote a play called "An Englishman's Home," which startled and puzzled Englishmen for a while, but could not carry an audience for one week in this country. Nobody took any interest in what his neighbor was doing, to say nothing of what Germany or any other countries were planning.
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Yet Wood was not discouraged. He was started on a long campaign and he knew he had to prepare to prepare. Furthermore the men in the universities who could see ahead came forward in his support and in support of the idea. Four years later President Drinker of Lehigh University wrote of the amazing success of the movement: "We owe it largely to Major-General Wood's farsightedness as a man of affairs and to his great qualities as a soldier and patriot, that our country was awakened to the need of preparedness, and this beginning of military training in our youth was due wholly to his initiative." [Footnote: National Service Magazine.]
Small as the beginning was it was a plant with the germ of strength in it, since at this first camp in Gettysburg the members formed then in 1913 the Society of the National Reserve Corps of the United States. Wood at once cooperated with this slender offshoot and gave it all the support in his power. He sent letters as Chief of Staff of the Regular Army to college presidents at the same time that the president of the new Corps did so--both suggesting an advisory committee to {211} assist the government in the encouragement and practical advancement of the training camp idea. This committee was formed and Presidents Hibben of Princeton and Drinker of Lehigh were elected president and secretary. The committee with these officers in charge gave assistance to Wood in his organizing work so that out of the small beginnings in the two camps an enormous organization arose which trained tens of thousands of young men to be officers and made the immense expansion of the little American army to 4,000,000 soldiers possible.
Pushing always quietly but unremittingly ahead Wood helped these officers to increase the camps from two to four in the summer of 1914--in Vermont, Michigan, North Carolina and California--with a total attendance of 667 students.
Then came the Great War and the beginning of the work on a large scale. From college students, who reported on the interest and pleasure which they got out of the summer camp, the life in the open and the military instruction afforded by regular army men, the movement extended to business men, lawyers, preachers and so on. Wood {212} opened the Plattsburg camp on Lake Champlain to the latter and started the first business man's camp. Each man paid his own railway fares, his own living expenses while in camp and bought his uniform and equipment, except arms, with his own money.
That year (1915) 3,406 men attended the five camps. In 1916 six camps were opened and 16,139 men attended them. At the close of the first Plattsburg camp the business men formed an organization for furthering and extending this training just as the college men had done at Gettysburg two years before. And in 1916 these two organizations consolidated and organized the present Military Training Camps Association of the United States.
All through this period, taking advantage of the European war, drawing lessons from the tragic happenings just across the Atlantic, Wood went about the country, as little "Bobs" of Kandahar had previously done in England, speaking in halls, in camps, in churches, at clubs, at festivals, on special and unspecial occasions of all kinds. He drove home the subject which he knew so well and others knew hardly at all. He met all comers of {213} every grade in arguments and debates--those who were constitutional objectors, pacifists, people who thought arbitration much more effective, people too proud to fight or too busy to get ready--all comers of all kinds. And the Great War day by day helped him. He spent his summers going from one camp to another, traveling all over the United States.
At six in the morning he would appear in one of them ready for inspection, and any day anywhere where there was a camp one might see him in the early morning sunshine, or the early morning rain striding up one company street and down another followed by new and old officers, peering into this dog tent and that kitchen, examining this man's rifle and that man's kit, praising, criticizing and jamming enthusiasm in two hours into a group of a thousand men in a manner they knew not how, nor clearly understood. It was just what he had done in Cuba, just what he had done in the Philippines where he had organized drilling, athletic and condition-of-equipment competitions in each company, each regiment, each brigade, each division--one pitted against another, all at it hot and heavy; {214} not because Wood came along and looked them over, but because when he did look them over he could spot any weakness in any part of the work with unerring certainty--not alone because he could spot any weakness, but because he knew a good point when he saw it and gave credit where credit was due.
It is perhaps not out of place here to look back in the light of events which occurred afterwards and are now a part of history and secure an estimate of what this work did for this country in awakening the people to a sense of the critical situation, to prepare an army which should do its part in the world war, to bring that army into line in France at what seems to have been a critical moment and to help bring the war itself to a successful conclusion in conjunction with the Allied armies which had held on so long against such terrific odds.