The Last of the Doughboys

Slate:

Pvt. William Lake and the rest of the Wild West Division trained at Camp Lewis, near Tacoma, Wash., he told me, for nine months before they boarded trains for Camp Merritt, N.J., whence they would head up to New York and ship out for France. According to the unnamed author of The Story of the 91st Division, published in 1919, the land portion of the trek took about six days. It was early summer; they traveled through a lot of areas that were probably quite hot at the time, and I doubt there were showers on those trains.