Blown in by the Draft

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER TWO PEGGING AWAY I?rain Yah Big Fool, Rain AH KEN swim an' Ah ken float; go on an' rain, yah big fool, ram?go on. Private Roscoe Dickerson Alexander, wet, soaked, half drowned, and with everything washed away but the wide grin he wore when he left New York city three hours before, slipped,...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER TWO PEGGING AWAY I?rain Yah Big Fool, Rain AH KEN swim an' Ah ken float; go on an' rain, yah big fool, ram?go on. Private Roscoe Dickerson Alexander, wet, soaked, half drowned, and with everything washed away but the wide grin he wore when he left New York city three hours before, slipped, splashed, floundered, but kept right on through the downpour. Boy, dis ain't no army?dis yar's a navy, Private Roscoe, newly christened to his high title of private, shouted against the storm to equally high Private Ezra Jackson Thomas. Dis ain't no place for us Americans, Ezra. Dis yar ain't even no right kind for a white man. Go on, yah big fool, rain?go right on. Ah ken swim an' Ah ken float. And the rain did keep right on shooting down and Roscoe and Ezra and 1,559 other negroes kept on splashing from Camp Upton's Grand Central Station to the barracks, where the 367th Infantry Regiment of the National Army of Freedom will be permanently located. It was a rough reception to tender San Juan Hill's proud, though far from haughty, fighting representatives, but even the worst storm in all the camp's eight weeks of history could not completely mar the occasion. For these dark birds, along with the Harlem Hopes and the Brooklyn Blacks, rode out from the city in style ?real style, such as no plain white selected men have ever ridden in. No pensioned sway back wooden cars rudely taken from some Home for Aged Vehicles brought them out, but brand new spic and span passenger cars of the latest 1917 Long Island model. And there was class to everything about this contingent, even down to the storm. Then an even dozen of the new soldiers wore shamrocks in the lapels of their dripping coats. And shamrocks and chocolate coloured folkbeing a bit of a strange combination ...