BILTMORE OSWALD

THE DIARY OF A HAPLESS RECRUIT

BY

J. THORNE SMITH, Jr.

U.S.N.R.F.

WITH 31 ILLUSTRATIONS IN BLACK-AND-WHITE

RICHARD DORGAN("Dick Dorgan")U.S.N.R.F.

NEW YORK

FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY

PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1918, by

Frederick A. Stokes CompanyAll Rights Reserved

Reprinted fromThe BroadsideA Journal forThe Naval Reserve Force

DEDICATION

To my buddies, an unscrupulous, clamorous crew of pirates, as loyaland generous a lot as ever returned a borrowed dress jumper with dirtytapes; to numerous jimmy-legs and P.O.'s whose cantankerous tempershave furnished me with much material for this book; and also to a dog,an admirable dog whom I choose to call Mr. Fogerty, with apologies tothis dog if in these pages his slave has unwittingly maligned hischaracter or in any way cast suspicion upon his moral integrity.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

"Biltmore Oswald" Frontispiece
"'Do you enlist for foreign service?' he snapped. 'Sure,' Ireplied, 'it will all be foreign to me'"
"The departure was moist"
"Hospital apprentice treated me to a shot of Pelham 'hop'"
"I feel like a masquerade"
"This, I thought, was adding insult to injury"
"Mother kept screaming through the wire about my underwear"
"A bill from a restaurant for $18.00 worth of past luncheons"
"He missed the dirty whites, but I will never be the same"
"Fire drill"
"This is designed to give us physical poise"
"Liberty Party"
"Of course I played the game no more"
"She was greatly delighted with the Y.M.C.A."
"I wasn't so very wrong—just the slight difference between portand present arms"
"The first thing he did was to mix poor dear grandfather a drink"
"I was tempted to shoot the cartridge out just to make it lighter"
"One fourth of the entire Pelham field artillery passed over mybody"
"The procedure, of course, did not go unnoticed"
"This war is going to put a lot of China

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