slab-companies

Updated: May 28, 2025

Then by squads and afterwards in what was intended as a "regimental formation," they went through a series of marchings, countermarchings and facings, with about the proficiency which would be shown by the same number of entirely raw recruits, and with the same proportion of the most obvious blunderings that used to be exhibited by the "slab-companies" at the "general trainings" or "general musters" in the country sections, when a lamentable caricature upon military spirit was kept up, in the years following the War of 1812.

Henry Morford - Shoulder-Straps: A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862