“Yonder is Lieutenant Alford now.”
A young man with a face as genial as his manner was dignified responded pleasantly to the private’s salute, and the rainfall seemed less dreary and all the camp more cheerful for this lieutenant’s presence. No wonder he seemed a prince to the enthusiastic young soldier whose admiration deepened into an abiding love he was never to lose out of his life in all the years to come. In the months that followed Thaine came to know Captain Clarke and his two lieutenants, Krause and Alford, as soldier knows soldier. Nor did ever Trojan nor Roman military hero have truer homage from the common private than the boy from the Grass River Valley paid to these young men commanding his company.
The hardships of soldier life began for Thaine Aydelot and his regiment with the day of enlistment. The privations at Camp Leedy were many. The volunteers had come in meagerly clothed because they expected to be fully supplied by the government they were to serve. The camp equipments were insufficient. The food was poor, and day after day the rain poured mercilessly down on the muddy campground, where the volunteers slept on wet straw piled on the wet earth. Sore throats, colds, and pneumonia 304 resulted, and many a homesick boy who learned to wade the rice swamps and to face the Mauser’s bullets fearlessly had his first hard lesson of endurance taught to him before he left Camp Leedy on the old Topeka Fair Ground.
Wonderful history-making filled up the May days. While the fleets and land forces were moving against Cuba, the deep sea cable brought the brief story from Commodore Dewey in the harbor of Manila, “Eleven Spanish warships destroyed and no Americans killed.”
And suddenly the center of interest shifted from the Cuban Island near at hand to the Philippines on the other side of the world. The front door of America that for four centuries had opened on the Atlantic ocean opened once and forever on Pacific waters. A new frontier receding ever before the footprint of the Anglo-American flung itself about the far-off island of the Orient with its old alluring call:
| Something lost behind the Ranges! Over Yonder! Go you there! |
And the Twentieth Kansas, under Colonel Fred Funston, broke camp and hurried to San Francisco to be ready to answer that call.
Thaine Aydelot had never been outside of Kansas before. Small wonder that the mountains, the desert, the vinelands, and orchard-lands, and rose-lands of California, the half-orientalism of San Francisco and the Pacific Ocean with its world-old mystery of untamed immensity should fill each day with a newer interest; or that the conditions of soldier life at Camp Merritt beside the Golden Gate, to which the eager-hearted, untrained young student from the Kansas 305 prairie brought all his youthful enthusiasm and patriotism and love of adventure, should wound his spirit and test his power of self-control. Small wonder, too, that the Twentieth Kansas Regiment, poorly equipped, undrilled, and non-uniformed still, should make only a sorry showing among the splendid regiments mobilized there; or that to the big, rich City of San Francisco the ragged fellows from the prairies, who were dubbed the “Kansas Scarecrows,” should become the byword and laughing stock among things military.
One neglect followed another for the Kansas Twentieth. The poorest camping spot was their portion. The chill of the nights, the heat of the days oppressed them. The filth of their unsanitary grounds bred discomfort and disease.
But no military favors were shown them, and the same old stupid jests and jibes of the ignorant citizen of the other states were repeated on the Pacific seaboard. When the thirtieth of May called forth the military forces in one grand parade the Twentieth Kansas was not invited to take part.