“Halt! Who goes there?” cries the sentinel.
“A flock of angels,” was the reply, and before the sentinel could get the corporal of the guard, the flock had flown.
The pièce de résistance of the camp was, however, a rat funeral for which elaborate preparations were made. Efforts for days were exerted to catch a rat or a mouse, but if neither could be beguiled into the trap, a grasshopper served the purpose. In a plebe’s tent an imposing catafalque, equal to that prepared for any crowned head, was constructed of wooden lockers covered with black rubber ponchos. Upon the top of this bier surrounded by candles was Mr. Rat.
During the night preceding the obsequies a guard of honor of the plebes, fantastically dressed, kept a running watch over the fast-stiffening rodent. Next day, after drill, came the funeral. Orders were issued by the upper-classmen for all plebes to attend and for those having musical instruments to appear with them. One plebe was detailed to act as chaplain and prepare the funeral oration, another as leader of the band, another as chief mourner. The remainder of the plebes were the afflicted relatives whose weeds were the most bizarre and fantastic costumes that they could create. In the procession, therefore, were plebes in underdrawers and dress coats buttoned in the rear, hats reversed, breeches with no shoes, shoes without breeches, ponchos over nature only, and sometimes in puris naturalibus. Each mourner, moreover, came with a galvanized bucket to catch his tears.
First appeared the band composed of mandolins and guitars, a stray violin, and perhaps a lonely cornet, followed by the deceased borne upon a canvas stretcher strewn with dandelions. To the tune of Chopin’s funeral march, the grotesquely arrayed mourners followed the bier, chanting from time to time a parody written for the music and entitled “Somebody Hit Me with a Codfish Ball!” At a signal from the chief mourner the cortège halted to allow the plebes to deliver themselves with abandon to their grief. By order, they raised the galvanized buckets to catch the “tears that stopped the flood-gates of their eyes,” while they filled the air with agonized mournings and lamentations. If the sobbing and blubbering appeared too faint, the upper-classmen who lined the route increased the wailings by yelling, “Weep louder, you plebes!”
At the grave, somewhere in the rear of the camp, the “chaplain,” “Daddy” Singles, spoke feelingly of the departed one’s nobility of soul. The gnawing grief of the multitude gave way once more to despair (and usually to laughter) as they lowered into the ground poor old Mr. Rat, whose rigid whiskers gave him an amused expression, as if he were enjoying his honorable end.
After two months’ training in camp, the cadets return to barracks to begin their academic duties. At once, all nonsense ceases, and the new cadet is in no wise interfered with, even in fun. The routine changes completely and the day becomes fuller. Reveille is a half hour later, but the work increases and there are fewer leisure moments.
It is to the more serious and inexorable side of his training that the cadet must now turn. Life in barracks is more sedate, more formal, more cold than the free existence of camp where he and his comrades were living close to Nature. The time has arrived to renounce the pleasure of sleeping in the open, of breathing the fragrant out-of-doors, of living in the midst of scenery that appeals to every æsthetic faculty. It is in the rooms of barracks that the next nine months must be passed, the severe unadorned rooms whose bareness, however, is forgotten in the ineffable sweetness of the friendship of one’s roommate. At no place, perhaps, are closer friendships formed than at West Point. They are not of the whirlwind kind so common elsewhere today, that sweep one off his feet for the time being. Nor are they like some great roaring wind that shakes one’s nature to its depths and then leaves him bruised and torn, but wide awake at last, to spend its force in other directions. Rather are they friendships of slower growth, but deep and sincere, belonging more to a mature age than to the irresponsible years of a cadet when his enthusiasm, his likes and dislikes, seem to be the only things necessary to foster.