r fit into these carefully worked out and elaborate
plans, all of which may, and probably will have to be hurriedly changed,
when there is little or no time to do so, just as the crisis of a sudden
campaign is forced upon us or is quickly culminating. Any commanding
officer of our army who cannot then quickly change that cut and dried
plan thrust into his hands by the War Department, and in the face of
sudden and almost insurmountable obstacles, and all of these conditions
entirely foreign to such plans, to work out in front of an enemy already
mobilized for battle--why--his name is--_MUD_!!

In all measures of this kind we felt compelled to take relating to these
deserters, the exigencies we had to face at any moment and the plan we
hastily made to fit into them, proved to be the deciding factor. Such a
thing as pursuing those deserters under any cut and dried programme
would have been not only ridiculous, but a blithering farce. That is
why, with a man of Mackenzie's horse sense, we were left to perfect
freedom of action, and our own independence or individual initiative.
Therefore, while it may seem almost treason for a graduate of West Point
to declare it, nothing that the writer had ever learned there was of the
slightest value to him in trailing these men. It was a problem
absolutely separate from the ordinary military processes, and governed
entirely by other factors than those to which an education at the
Military Academy had any relation.

Intensive Training as a Fine Art (?)

The writer's son, a Major of Infantry (a temporary Lieut-Colonel), took
over to France a training battalion of the Sixteenth U. S. Infantry from
Syracuse, N. Y., in November, 1917. He was trained in the Toul Sector by
a Major Rasmussen of the Canadian Infantry (later killed by an H. E.
shell). He says that a few weeks of practical trench training and hand
grenade work, etc., was of more value to him than months of such
training as he had had in the Syracuse Camp.

The writer had a son-in-law who had had fifteen years' experience
in the field as a Civil Engineer with the largest company in St.
Louis--surveying, platting, laying out suburban tracts, including road
building, sewer and culvert construction, etc. He lacked the elements of
military engineering, pontoon bridge building, military trenches, with
barbed wire placing, hand grenade work, etc. He entered the Fort Riley
Training Camp in May, 1917, was transferred to Leavenworth, t