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7.

Fort Oglethorpe was one out of half a dozen or so being conducted at the same time.  Drill began the second morning, and from that time on we were subjected to intensive training.   I learned later that the physical work was more strenuous than that to which the ordinary enlisted man is subjected.  After about a month all of us had a re-examination, and perhaps a dozen men, on the average, were eliminated from each company for physical reasons,  No doubt the strenuous regime brought into activity some latent cases of tuberculosis, and other defects may have been overlooked at the examination for enlistment. 

After a day or two the reserve officers, temporarily in charge of the companies, were relieved by regular army captains.  The camp as a whole was commanded by Col. Slocum, an elderly officer who had been in command of the army post at Columbus, New Mexico, on the occasion of Villa's raid there.  One or two other regular officers of indeterminate rank were in the camp.  I remember particularly a Major McCleave, a slender, handsome infantry officer who use to address us in the evenings.

Each company had two or three reserve lieutenants, who had received commissions for the camp at Plattsburg, and who, we learned later, were on a sort of probation with us.  They were, as a group, good fellows.  They varied in their ability, but all of them seemed afraid of their regular army superiors.

The commander of company 13 was Capt. Ben Nicklin.  He had come up through the ranks, was a veteran of the Spanish-American war and the Philippine campaigns,