057
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Title
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057
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Transcription
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workers, but the foundations have been well laid, the growth has been carefully guided, and when the opportunity comes, the larger service will be given.
NELLIE JANE COMPTON.
THE MILITARY DEPARTMENT
The outstanding feature in the history of the Military Department of the University is, it need hardly be said, General Pershing's four years' service as commanding officer of the battalion. The personality of the young lieutenant, then fresh from the Indian wars, found immediate expression in a stricter discipline and an infectious professional enthusiasm. It cannot be averred that discipline was then, nor is it now, a conspicuous quality of Nebraska life. Lieutenant Dudley, our first commandant, had provoked a downright mutiny by an "arbitrary and unreasonable" insistence upon the wearing of uniforms at drill! Upon the advent of Lieutenant Pershing in 1891, the young men found that the nameless tyrannies of his predecessors, Lieutenants Dudley, Webster, Townley and Griffith, were but faint adumbrations of what they were now facing. But there was no mutiny. On the contrary, it was the beginning of whatever spontaneous enthusiasm the students have since shown in military studies. In 1893, Pershing received his bachelor's degree from the University in the College Of Law. In the same year, the Pershing Rifles were organized for voluntary additional drill. They are still in existence, destined apparently to remain a permanent part of our military organization. It may be said in general that this period of Pershing's life, with its profound impression upon the student body, foreshadowed upon a small stage his later achievements in the great field of the world's history. His name became a legendary one among successive generations of undergraduates, whose memories are usually so short. No one has ever been heard to express surprise at the prom-
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Rights
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