TRANSCRIBED FROM THE COURIER INDEX OCTOBER 4, 1918 P. 1
Have been intending writing you ever since I came to the camp. Am glad to say I am well pleased and well situated. Am in the officer’s training school.
The work a student goes through here, he wouldn’t get otherwise in two or three years, and the training is very intensive and thorough, and believe me, hard, too. We work about 16 hours per day, getting up at 5:45 and don’t have a minute to spare during the day, having to study at night till 9:30 and retire at ten. They tell us that all the time after that is ours, and it is spent in the bunks, the lights being turned out at ten o’clock. We are given passes on Saturday afternoon, and they are good until 12 that night, provided you haven’t been “skinned” during the week. The “skins” are the same as demerits, and are given for having dirty rifle, buttons off, shoes not polished, not being shaved or failure to properly prepare your bunk and sweep around it. So far, I have been fortunate enough not to get any “skins” but you get them when you least expect them, and for each skin you lose your Saturday pass, and have to spend one hour and forty five minutes walking across the drill ground under arms, so you can readily see that we all do our utmost not to be “skinned.”
Most of the camp is quarantined at this time on account of Spanish influenza. There are hundreds of cases here, and it seems that everybody has a cold. I have one now, and sincerely trust nothing serious will result for if you are absent from the school eight days, you lose out and are sent back to your old company, or wait and try the next school.
I am so busy here now that I don’t have time to go around to the other companies and see my boy friends from Marianna, and it seems that when I am on pass that I never happen to run into any of them. There isn’t much time for anyone to get lonesome here. It is generally talked here that the graduates from this school will all be sent to France, which will suit me fine, as I am anxious to go, and the same might be said of all that I have heard discuss it.
NOTES: Rupert Guy Apple was born on July 27, 1887 in Ward, Arkansas and died on October 19, 1920. He is buried in the Lonoke Cemetery in Lonoke, Arkansas. He was the Circuit Clerk of Lee County and was training to be an officer at Camp Pike. He was writing to the editor of the newspaper.
TRANSCRIBED BY LINDA MATTHEWS
Have been intending writing you ever since I came to the camp. Am glad to say I am well pleased and well situated. Am in the officer’s training school.
The work a student goes through here, he wouldn’t get otherwise in two or three years, and the training is very intensive and thorough, and believe me, hard, too. We work about 16 hours per day, getting up at 5:45 and don’t have a minute to spare during the day, having to study at night till 9:30 and retire at ten. They tell us that all the time after that is ours, and it is spent in the bunks, the lights being turned out at ten o’clock. We are given passes on Saturday afternoon, and they are good until 12 that night, provided you haven’t been “skinned” during the week. The “skins” are the same as demerits, and are given for having dirty rifle, buttons off, shoes not polished, not being shaved or failure to properly prepare your bunk and sweep around it. So far, I have been fortunate enough not to get any “skins” but you get them when you least expect them, and for each skin you lose your Saturday pass, and have to spend one hour and forty five minutes walking across the drill ground under arms, so you can readily see that we all do our utmost not to be “skinned.”
Most of the camp is quarantined at this time on account of Spanish influenza. There are hundreds of cases here, and it seems that everybody has a cold. I have one now, and sincerely trust nothing serious will result for if you are absent from the school eight days, you lose out and are sent back to your old company, or wait and try the next school.
I am so busy here now that I don’t have time to go around to the other companies and see my boy friends from Marianna, and it seems that when I am on pass that I never happen to run into any of them. There isn’t much time for anyone to get lonesome here. It is generally talked here that the graduates from this school will all be sent to France, which will suit me fine, as I am anxious to go, and the same might be said of all that I have heard discuss it.
NOTES: Rupert Guy Apple was born on July 27, 1887 in Ward, Arkansas and died on October 19, 1920. He is buried in the Lonoke Cemetery in Lonoke, Arkansas. He was the Circuit Clerk of Lee County and was training to be an officer at Camp Pike. He was writing to the editor of the newspaper.
TRANSCRIBED BY LINDA MATTHEWS