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They always came to camp “flush” with money, and received every encouragement from the bummers of the company to spend it freely; if they did not do this, they were in a degree ostracised, and their lot made much harder.
When their boxes of goodies arrived from home, the lion's share went to the old hands.
If the recruit did not give it to them, the meanest of them would steal it when he was away on detail.
Then, all sorts of games were played on recruits by men who liked nothing so well as a practical joke.
I recall the case of a young man in my own company who had just arrived, and, having been to the quartermaster for his outfit of clothing and equipments, was asked by one of the practical jokers why he did not get his umbrella.
“Do they furnish an umbrella?”
he asked.
“Why, certainly,” said his persecutor, unblushingly.
“It's just like that fraud of a quartermaster to jew a recruit out of a part of his outfit, to sell for his own benefit.
Go back and demand your umbrella of him, and a good one too!”
And the poor beguiled recruit returned to the quartermaster in high dudgeon at the imagined attempt to swindle him, only to find, after a little breeze, that he had been victimized by one of the practical jokers of the camp.
There were at least two kinds of recruits to be found in every squad that arrived in camp.
One of these classes was made up of modest, straightforward men, who accepted their new situation with its deprivations gracefully, and brought no sugar-plums to camp with which to ease their entrance into stern life on government fare and the hardships of government service.
They wore the government clothing as it was furnished them, from the unshapely, uncomely forage cap to the shoddy, inelastic sock.
It mattered naught to them that the limited stock of the quartermaster furnished nothing that fitted them.
They accepted what he tendered cheerfully, believing it to be all right, and seemed as happy and as much at ease in a wilderness of
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