I don't think a lot of applicants were being rejected. My
cousin the local museum director and amateur historian tells
me the U.S. Army opened hernia-repair hospitals to make the
many otherwise suitable draftees war-worthy. Remember that in
1917 human heavy lifting was everyday common on farms and in
factories.
Joy
>Richard Moore wrote:
> "Yet whatever tranquillity Chandler may have felt
was disrupted by
America's
> declaration of war in 1917. As an American, he had
not joined up in 1914,
but
> in August 1917, together with Gordon Pascal,
Julian's son, he went up to
> Victoria, British Columbia, and enlisted in the
Canadian army. After the
war he
> told some of his friends that he had tried to join
the American Army, only
to
> be rejected for bad eyesight; but it is more likely
that he preferred the
> Canadians because, as he admitted, "'it was still
natural for me to prefer
a
> British uniform,' which his dual nationality
permitted. Moreover, the
Canadian army
> paid a separation allowance to his mother, which the
American would not
do,
> and this was an important consideration."
>
> Looking at the Tom Hiney biography, I don't see the
statement that joining
> the Canadian army was a quicker way to the front,
although at war for
three
> years by 1917 that is certainly true. Hiney does
make a good case that
Chandler
> was restless as a 28 year old accountant living with
his mother and
joining the
> army was an honorable way for him to leave his
mother alone in L.A.
without
> feeling guilty about it.
>
> Chandler's occasional mentions of his service are
powerful as when he
noted
> that after leading a platoon into direct machine gun
fire "nothing is ever
the
> same again."
-- # Plain ASCII text only, please. Anything else won't show up. # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 17 Dec 2003 EST