“It’s all your fault!” he declared to Ned and Jerry. “You wait! I’ll get square with you!”
But as several days passed, and the “scrapper,” as he was called, made no effort to carry out his threat, Ned and Jerry rather forgot about it. As for the midnight meeting, it seemed to have been nothing more than an attempt on the part of Pug Kennedy to be friendly with some civilian he had met in town.
“Though what they were talking about I can’t guess,” said Jerry.
The days in camp were spent in drill. It was drill, drill, drill from morning until night.
Most of the drills were for the purpose of getting the new soldiers in good physical shape, fit to stand the hard work that would come later. To the three motor boys it was much the same sort of thing they had gone through when training for football. There were the preliminary steps, the slow movements, followed by speeding-up practice and then hard driving.
In the course of a few weeks they learned how to march in unison, how to go through certain parts of the rifle drill without making it look too ragged, and finally, one day, orders were issued for bayonet drill.
“This is beginning to look like real war, now,” said Ned in delight, as he and his chums got their guns and bayonets ready for the work.
“What is it to be, trench or with the bags?” asked Bob.
“Bags,” answered Jerry, who had been reading the orders. “The trench work comes later.”
There are several kinds of bayonet drill and exercise, and among them are trench and bag work. In the former, which is only used after the youths have become somewhat familiar with the weapon, there are two lines of soldiers. One is down in a trench, and they are “attacked” by another line standing above them, the theory being that the party outside the trench is the attacking one.
Bag bayonet work is something on the same scale as tackling the dummy in football practice. On a wooden framework a number of canvas bags, filled with sawdust, shavings, hay or other soft material, are suspended. On each bag, which swings freely by two ropes, are painted two white dots. These, in a measure, correspond to the scarlet heart on the buffer of a fencer.
Standing in a row before the swinging bags, with leveled bayonets, the young soldiers endeavor to stab through the object as near the white spots as possible. This is to train their eyes.
