Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II CAMP THOMAS, GEORGIA As I had apprehended, I found that my own troop (M) had not assumed material form. The Colonel assigned me to Troop D. I had commanded this troop for a short time, years before. The term of service had been shortened since then, and there were none of the men of that day in the troop. But to my great satisfaction I found that the First Sergeant was William H. Givens, whom I remembered as a sergeant in Troop B when I joined it fresh from West Point in 1877, and as First Sergeant of Troop K while I served in that organization several years later. We had followed many a long, dry trail together in Texas and Arizona. The two lieutenants whom I found with the troop I had never met before. My First Lieutenant was soon detailed as recruiting-officer in Chattanooga, leaving me my Second Lieutenant, J. F. Kennington, a West Point graduate of 1896, who had recently, in the absence of the First Lieutenant as well as of the Captain, commanded the troop for some time. His knowledge of the men and affairsof the troop made his services peculiarly valuable. About the first thing I did on assuming command was to take an inventory of the property in the hands of the men. I made a blank form, with the roster of the troop in a column on the left-hand side, and the articles constituting the kit on a line at the top, with four columns for each article. Armed with this sheet, and accompanied by the First Sergeant, I went through each squad in succession, checking each article opposite each name as here indicated : 5—serviceable. R—to be repaired in troop. C—to be condemned. M—missing. The articles to be repaired were mostly saddlery. They were pointed out to the chiefs of squads, who were charged with seeing that the men responsible for them took them to the troop...