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We moved to Dublin after seven months of drill and medical lectures in barracks at Limerick. After about a fortnight in the Portobello Barracks we crossed to England and pitched our camp at Basingstoke. Here we had two or three months' divisional training. The whole of the Xth Division about 25,000 men used to turn out for long route-marches. We were out in all weathers.
The drills and route-marches in sun, wind and rain had tanned our flesh to pink and brown, and lit the lamps of health in our eyes. And the whites of those eyes were blue-white. But the doctor, a curt major, said "Strip," and took Doe first. Now, a glance at Doe, when stripped, ought to have satisfied a doctor.
He made no bones about obeying orders and saluting officers acts of abasement which grated sorely at times upon his colleagues, who reverenced no one except themselves and their Union. He appeared to revel in muddy route-marches, and invariably provoked and led the choruses. The men called him "Wee Pe'er," and ultimately adopted him as a sort of company mascot.
Upon Company route-marches he had to be embedded in some safe place in the middle of the column; in fact, his enormous stride and pedestrian enthusiasm would have reduced his followers to pulp. At Mess he was mute: like a wise man, he was feeling for his feet. But being, like Moses, slow of tongue, he provided himself with an Aaron. Quite inadvertently, be it said.
For six days we lay snug in this village, every day going for route-marches of fifteen to twenty miles to harden us up again after the soft days on the transport. We knew we were on the lip of the caldron of war, for day and night we heard the rumbling of the guns. Then on the seventh day I was chosen as one of a party to go up to the trenches and find out the positions we were to take over.
After the corps had been duly established, he amused himself by drilling them on Sunday afternoons and modelling new buttons for their uniforms; to give them the requisite military stamina he over-fed and starved them by turns, wrapped them in sheepskin overcoats for long route-marches in July, exercised them in sham fights with live grapeshot and unblunted stilettos and otherwise thinned their ranks of undesirables, and hardened their physique, by forcing them to escalade horrible precipices at midnight on horseback.
During those days they multiplied the route-marches and the exercises intended to let the officers get the men again in hand. These maneuvers tired us to death, and especially the sham attacks on wooded mounds, carried out in the evening among bogs and thorn-thickets.
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