Letter from John M. Baker to Dr. W.E. Simonds

Letter from John M. Baker to Dr. W.E. Simonds

Baker writes: "After a nearly two hundred mile cross country hike up here, our regiment and brigade has set to work on the last and most interesting part of our training, [actual] firing and reconnaissance under simulated campaign conditions. After ten months of waiting we are beginnning to see the actual task it is up to us to work at. It may take us many weeks yet before we leave but it is now a matter of weeks not months. I am afraid that as other people look at it, I am a failure in military life. I have put all I had into learning the game. I have gone without passes and applied myself steadily to reading up on it and figuring problems but I am still a corporal." Baker regales Simonds with tales of life in training: "I am so amazingly impractical. I worked weeks until I could use a certain crude fire control instrument better than anyone else in the Battery, then I made good with it out on the range and then - I went off and left it in the manger. My horse pulled it out and trampled on it! The other day after doing a fairly hard bit of reconnaissance, I fell off my horse. A few days later, I was just finishing successfully an orientation problem with the assistant Reconnaissance Officer when I nearly tripped the Colonel with a 50 meter tope line." Baker also observes "Men were just types to me when at college, now they are personalities..." Baker observes of his peers that "We are all mighty youthful, I guess for the spirit of the gun fire sets our blood tingling. War does not seem like a terrible thing, it seems fun. It seems like a thrilling game as we rehearse it out among the dark pines. It then seems a shame that it is only sham." Baker then goes on to note, "It is only when we return with our tired horses to camp, and see the barracks so recently occupied by the men who are now in the great work over there that we realize that it isn't fine, but means death perhaps - but even suffering sounds fascinating when you are strong and well and far away. Last fall I thought the men had no ideals about the war, but now it is different. They feel we have a great task to accomplish over there and that it will be difficult to finish but that it must be finished and they feel kind of pride.... It is great to be living in that hope!"

World War I; First World War; Military training; Soldiers;

Baker, John M.;

7/15/1918

15.3 x 22.7 cm

eng

Text

WWI-457;
WWI-458;
WWI-459;
WWI-460;

1918