 This is Jimmy Powers coming your way with another Grantland Rice story. Hi there, this is Jimmy Powers transcribed. Today, from the Granny Rice's best-selling autobiography, The Tumult on the Shouting, we take you back to the period of World War I. It was 1918. Granny was no youngster. He'd been established even then as the most widely read sports columnist in America. But, let's see what he had to say about this particular period. I'll pick up his narrative in first person that reads like this. When the United States declared war on Germany in April 1917, I was 37 and had been banging away for the Tribune Syndicate for four years. Quite a string of papers were using the sport light column and my pay amounted to $300 a week. In December of that year, I handed over all my securities, totaling about $75,000 to a lawyer for safekeeping. If I didn't come back, at least there remained a tidy chunk for my two girls. Then I enlisted as a private in the infantry. On December 5, 1917, a bitter cold day, I pulled out of New York headed for the balmy old south. It was five above and snowing when our train chugged into Greenville, South Carolina. We were marched to Camp Sevillier and issued gear, a pup tent and miscellaneous paraphernalia. My tent had a rent in it as big as a frying pan. The next morning, when I awoke, I found myself up to my ears in snow and mud. The cold I got that first night in the sunny south lasted until the armistice. The majority of our outfit consisted of Southern farm boys. The fact that I was older than most and knew my left foot from my right probably had a lot to do with my becoming a sergeant drill instructor and then a candidate for officer training. During the two months of study and preparation for the written exam required for commission, I was fortunate in getting to know Colonel John Geary. He had a sharp sense of humor and he understood the enlisted man far better than most officers. Geary helped me to qualify for my commission. In fact, without him I never would have made it. He had been the athletic officer at the Presidio in California and after I was pinned the second lieutenant he put me to work. One morning he called for me. Lieutenant, he said, I've got two jobs for you. Colonel, I replied I am already Miss Officer, telephone sentry, athletic officer, and liaison officer of this outfit. I need more sleep, not more jobs. In this army, replied Geary, it's not how many jobs you have, it's what jobs? Also, that patch of trees over there must be cleared for a baseball field for a game two weeks from today. Colonel Geary's patch was a solid green forest. The next morning I had 280 men working that forest with picks, axes, saws, and dynamite. The noise of hundreds of stumps being blown to kingdom come was vibrant. In the midst of the flying debris, General Gatley appeared. You've got every man in the regiment, he roared. Who gave you the authority? Colonel Geary, sir, I replied. We played that ball game two weeks later against the 114th. One morning the entire company was in the field working on a problem involving sighting in cannon for range, deflection, and the rest. My enlisted man and I were in a cluster of turpentine pines. It was hot. Our four-inch Howitzer was a sought-off pine log. The problem was valid to almost everyone but me. Stripped to the waist, my NCO was hard at work when Colonel Geary appeared. Son, he asked, do you know what you're doing? Sir, I answered, I haven't the slightest idea. Just as I thought, observed Gatley. Well, I've got something more important for you to do. The morale of this outfit needs a boost. I want you to write me a song, something the men can sing. I never got around to writing that song. Gatley was a Spartan leader. Some of the old-timers in that outfit who had served with him in the Philippines told a yarn that characterized this rugged soldier. Gatley's mountain artillery was scaling a high Philippine mountain ridge, bringing up disassembled guns by mule. The animals were threading their way high up on the mountain pass when one mule with more curiosity than sense stopped, stretched his neck over the side, and promptly fell into the ravine 1,000 feet below, gun and all. Charging up, Gatley looked over the side, then roared, It serves you right. One day, walking down the company street, I saw a young recruit sitting in the gutter. One look told me he came from the Tennessee mountains. With his eyes swollen with tears, he was the most homesick pup I ever saw. Looking up at me with a vacant expression he drawled, Is this France? He had never been more than 10 miles from home before. In April 1918, our outfits sailed from Hoboken, New Jersey aboard the old George Washington. Weeks later, we arrived at Sherberg. I started to the front with my bunch, but didn't get very far before an order came through reassigning me to Paris and the Stars and Stripes. Alec Wolcott, Will Irwin, F.P. Adams, Harold Ross, and others were putting out a daily paper for our soldiers. I shied at the assignment, but it wasn't until four months later that I managed to get orders cut reassigning me to the 115th, then up near the Belgian border. After I came home, Kit showed me a letter written to her by Irwin on the day I left Paris for the front. Dear Kit, I saw Granny off to war today. I never saw such a departure for the front. He marched out of here with the biggest backpack I've seen on a mortal, let alone a mule. He was packing enough equipment to quartermaster half the boys at the front. I was pretty loaded down at that, blankets, fry pan, burner, extra shoes, rifle, that infernal gas mask, socks, shelter half, ammunition. I shed stuff like a molding turkey sheds its feathers until by the time I'd relocated the old 115th, I was wearing one raincoat, period. As a soldier, I was no great shucks. As an officer, I didn't crowd MacArthur. However, I saw and experienced enough of the filth, suffering, and horror of war to realize it never can account for anything that a slice of good Christian faith can't outstrip every time. I saw youngsters hurtling through the skies over France in small fighter planes, and I watched more than a few of them come down in flames. I saw kids and old men slugging through the mud to the front, and the heart inside me twisted as I watched those lines of walking wounded threading their tortured way back again, leaving so many of their buddies dead where they had fallen. I don't think many men come out of a war with their ideals and idols exactly the same. In my case, I found war to be a quick distillation of life's tribulations, all wrapped up in a red, raw bundle. In war, however, the good in a fellow's surfaces or sinks much quicker than in civilian life. In many ways, the same applies to sport. Thinking on these things one night, I scratched out the battle line. Wars may be on again, wars may be over, so far as the guns are concerned. But life is a fight, not a dream in the clover, no matter what road you have turned. Fate is a party who ducks from the fighter that faces him squarely and grins. But oh, what a wallop he takes at the blighter who trembles when trouble begins. For it's trouble that toughens that fiber all through the best little trainer the world ever knew. Perhaps we are through with the lung-burning gases on which I am betting no scent. But even if shrapnel or bursting bomb passes, there still is the bill for the rent. There's poverty, bitterness, worry or sorrow to lead a left hook for the glim. And it may come today or it may come tomorrow, so you might just as well keep in trim. And it's trouble that strengthens the point of the jaw, the best little trainer the world ever saw. When the armistice was finally flashed around the world on November the 11th, 1918, I was at third-core headquarters on the northwest corner of France near the Belgian border. Everybody from Buck Private to Brigadier immediately got drunk on anything and everything from cognac to sternot. I wound up at Angers, France, with thousands of troops who suddenly had nothing to do except think and dream about home. We moved down to a port in the south of France and there we sat on our hunches, waiting and hoping for those heaven-sent orders assigning us to a ship. Our ship finally hoeved into port. She was the rindum of the Holland-American line. A flu epidemic broke out less than three days after we pulled anchor. It was a heart-rending sight watching those men and boys dying like flies, knowing they were sinking but struggling that much harder to get home. A thankful subdued Lieutenant Rice landed at Newport News, Virginia on a drizzly day in February 1919. I had scarcely thrown down my gear when I learned that the lawyer with whom I had entrusted my securities in 1917 had just committed suicide by swallowing poison. Apparently, he had reinvested the money I left with him and had lost the entire bankroll. 18 years after starting, I was back at scratch. I blame myself for that poor fellow's death. I shouldn't have put that much temptation in his way. Kit, Flancy, and I went up to Lake Placid for several weeks. There we succeeded pretty well in getting the misery and stench of war out of our systems for a little while. For dreams have a habit of jerking you back into your past. My days were about to be caught up in the fantastic boom of business and sports, the Golden Twenties. But for years my dreams were of France and of those who made a crossing much bigger than those of us who had made the long voyage home to the USA. Well, that's it for today. Now, this is Jimmy Power's transcribe saying, So long until next time.