Captain Ted: A Boy's Adventures Among Hiding Slackers in the Great Georgia Swamp

by Louis Pendleton

At last the impatiently awaited hour for their departure arrived and the two boys boarded the train for Augusta. They were almost too excited for speech when, early in the morning of a fine day, their train rolled into the Georgia city widely famed for the great war cantonment in its neighborhood, and they looked forth to see groups of young men in khaki tramping its streets. They were met at the station by Lieut. John Markham, a cousin of both boys who was with the Pennsylvanians at Camp Hancock because his mother, another sister of the Ridgway brothers, had married a Philadelphian and lived many years in the city by the Delaware.

Never will Ted forget that day. As he and Hubert took the train that night for southern Georgia he declared that his eyes were "dead tired from so much looking." First they drove out to the camp and over its extensive area, wherein Ted's wish to see thousands of soldiers was abundantly gratified. Later they walked about, saw the quarters of the officers, looked into the tents of the privates, and at many points watched the soldiers drill, drill, drill—infantry drill, physical drill, bayonet exercise and target practice. They even found opportunity in the course of another long drive to witness actual firing of field artillery on a ten-mile range, and, as the sound of the great guns lifted the awed boys to their highest pitch of excitement, they felt that they saw war in the making indeed.

But the most inspiring sight of all, to Ted, was the infantry drill. The measured, simultaneous movement of so many men, to the beat of drums and the martial airs of the bands, thrilled the boy from head to foot, and it seemed to him that all things centered in this brave and beautiful array which it was his wonderful privilege to see. As he looked and listened, he would not have changed places with a king, and for the moment to have been anywhere else in the world but at Camp Hancock would have been like exile from all that he held dear.

They also looked at the experimental military bridge building of the engineering corps and inspected the practice trenches, learning that the extensive system of the latter had been built under the personal supervision of French and English officers. Both Ted and Hubert asked many questions and much was explained to them—points about the first-line trenches and the great communicating ditches that led off zigzag instead of straight in the rear, "so that they could not be enfiladed" by the enemy's cannon.

At noon they dined with Lieut. Markham in the officers' quarters of his regiment. This in itself was a great event and Ted could hardly eat for watching and learning the rank of each, his interest heightening when two or three French and English officers were pointed out to him. With the eye of a hawk he noted the manners of the French, the British and the Americans, hoping to achieve a successful imitation. Several of the friends of Cousin John were very attentive to the delighted and flattered boys, being especially polite to Ted who proudly thought they recognized a coming comrade in a Boy Scout in khaki.

"Now let's go to the bayonet run and see the boys spit the Boches," said Lieut. Markham early in the afternoon.

This was one of the forms of bayonet exercise, and both boys watched it absorbed, fascinated, oblivious of everything else in the great camp. Strapping young fellows in khaki sprinted up an incline, leaped over obstructions in their path, and plunged down toward suspended dummies, at which or through which they thrust their bayonets. This was spitting or impaling the Boches in a bayonet charge.

"Why do they call them 'Boches,' Cousin John?" asked Hubert, quite superfluously in the opinion of Ted, who knew already.

"It's a French nickname for the Germans—not very complimentary," was the answer. "Means something like 'blockhead,' I'm told."

At the railway station in Augusta that night, as they took leave of their kindly kinsman, who had exerted himself both to entertain and instruct, Ted could hardly take his mind off the vivid and crowding recollections of the day, but he did not forget his manners.