Viewing page 16 of 171

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

-2-

To be an artillery officer, therefore, you had to be able to ride a horse.  That was one thing our American instructors could teach us, or at least they could weed out those of us who kept falling off.  In another field artillery training unit, not number 8, an instructor was accidentally killed while leading his pupils at a gallop through woods with overhanging branches.  His funeral was an elaborate military ceremony, featuring Chopin's Funeral March.  He was the son of a noted Philadelphia publisher.  Our camp was renamed Camp Warden McLean in his honor.

Our Battery 8 likewise rode hell-for-leather through the woods, but we had no fatalities.  Our worst accident came one day when we rode down the steep slope of a railroad cut.  A horse fell, rolled over and landed with a leg stuck under a steel rail.  In struggling to get up he broke the leg and had to be shot.

Our riding instructor was Captain (later Major) Sands himself, polo player and expert horseman.  We ended each session by takung a series of log hurdles, of varying height, that ran along one side of our drill field.  I had no trouble, for I had the advantage of a sountry upbringing.  But some of our cadets, from the cities, had rarely if ever ridden horseback before they met Captain Sands.  I recall in particular a young Jew from Memphis, named Blutenthal.  He was a Princeton mzn and I liked him, but I wondered why he had chosen field artillery.  He had never been on a horse before going into the army.  He had a pudgy build, and he simply could not go over a hurdle without grabbing the saddle or falling off.  I must have heard his body thump the ground at least a dozen times, with Sands contemptuously ordering him to try again.  He always did and always failed.  He was washed out from Battery 8, but I heard later that he had found a job in the intelligence department.

The worse fault of our 3-inch gun was that when fired the recoil tended to jolt it out of its setting, so that it had to be re-aimed before the next shot.  It was also slow on recoil and return.  The French 75 millimeter gun, very near the same caliber, was much more stable and much quicker on recoil and return.  It could therefore be fired at more rapid rates than the 4-incher.  It could indeed be fired so rapidly that it became red-hot.  That could cause

Transcription Notes:
. Smithsonian: Our goal is to improve readability and searchability and we want to avoid cluttering the pages. it is not an insert in paragraph 2, it indicates a space should be there. (he was proofreading his own work)also over in the same 2nd paragraph. Same reason in 3rd paragraph. His own work proofreading!