100 years ago: Army discipline comes to Pullman campus

A Pullman correspondent wrote that Washington State College “was not at all like its former self.”

Instead of a regular undergraduate student body, the campus was filled with a “regiment of the student army training corps.”

“Instead of coagulating noisily into classes, the students are falling into company formation,” said the correspondent. “Instead of tipping an occasional diffident cap at passing professors, they are bestowing slightly self-conscious salutes on the spotless young officers with whom the campus has all of a sudden become densely populated. Out on the athletic fields, there are more boys than ever before, but they are being initiated into the mysteries of squads right in place of end runs and interference.”

From the casualty file: The parents of the late Pvt. James Allen of Spokane received a letter from his first lieutenant in France.

He extolled the “courage and devotion” their son had displayed in the second battle of the Marne.

“He acted as No. 1 in a gun squad in the service of a French 75 field piece …, and it was while in the performance of his duty that he was struck by a shell fragment and instantly killed,” wrote the officer. “Private Allen had endeared himself to all of us, and we feel his loss deeply. … His name will forever be remembered in the annals of the battery.”