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CORPORAL CARLISLE L. JONES Ex-'18, 355th Infantry
In the rush of great events, all crowded into the space of one short year, the plans, prospects, ideas and lives of hundreds of Nebraska men have changed -- changed from what seemed a big part in a small world to what they know is a tiny part in the biggest thing the world has done.
The rooming house, fraternity house and home have faded from all but memory, rather fresh memory perhaps, and has given room to the long wooden barracks or the peaked tents of the camps and cantonments. College boarding house meals with their accompaniment of scandal, scholarship and sentiment are replaced by the government's mess, devoid of all such camouflage. Those long evenings of study, evenings of stories around the blue smoke in the comer room or evenings of society in the parlor, the ball room or elsewhere, are now short evenings after long days of work, evenings all too full of the preparations for a new day and in time, for the big day, to leave much time for recalling memories of the past.
But the Nebraska man, be he officer or enlisted man, has not forgotten, for all his sudden plunge into the ice water of the unexpected, his college, his college friends who were or are there, nor the time, yet so shortly past, that he spent there. From college freedom to military discipline is a long step and sometimes a hard one, to take without balking.
Imagine, then, the average man (who never has really existed at all) whose greatest trouble was once an "eight o'clock" three mornings a week. Even a spring sun is laggard compared with the bugle and he rolls half out of his bunk before the second blast of the whistle has died away. Never did he dress like that on the morning of his most final final. The trousers lace with a jerk, the shoes slide on, leggings snap, hat, coat or blouse, gloves and a rifle settle into place as the line for reveille is formed and a day in the life of a soldier or of a soldier in making, has begun.
There are three hundred sixty-five chances in a year that that day will be a busy one. They sing songs about the lazy life in the army, that may be well enough, there is nothing wrong with army life, often there is much wrong with the songs. For the army of today for officers and men is far from a life of bombast and bass drums. It was created to work, created and named for a purpose at the same time and the purpose could only be reached by work. And so the university man who has traded a life full of history and system and the principles of Economics for the multiple theories of getting dutchmen before multiple dutchmen get you, has found, whether his leggings be shiny or not, that they left convocation out of the program.
They found rather that it was a big, busy, healthy, happy life. They found in the majority of cases, too, that they would be glad to return to civil life when the time came, but that while the "thing" lasted they wanted to be a part of it. There was little moving picture enthusiasm, there was no moving picture changeableness. University men from generalissimos to kitchen police came and have stayed with the idea that it was the least that could be expected of them, to come and to stay. More than that, they have learned to like it and they have, almost without exception, made good at it.
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