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6 “It’s a Huge Regiment Now” 77 C amp Mills was named in honor of the late Albert Mills, who had served in the Spanish-American War and received a Medal of Honor for rallying his men after taking a bullet through the head and being temporarily blinded. After this, he had been superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy and before his death in 1916 had drawn up plans for federalizing the National Guard. The camp itself—one hundred twenty acres on what is known as Hempstead Plains—had been built on the site of another training cantonment, Camp Black, where troops headed for Cuba in 1898 had received their training. Several of the older veterans of the Sixty-ninth were familiar with the site because they had been sent there when the regiment had been mustered into service during the Spanish-American War. The task of remaking Mills into a place to drill thousands of untrained soldiers in the art of modern warfare had fallen to the Army engineers. Once it was ready, pioneer units from the 165th Infantry, mostly from the Third Battalion, went to work setting up tents for their comrades-inarms back in the armory in Manhattan. As Pvt. Al Ettinger, one of the Pioneers, put it, “It was laborious work, but we went at it with zeal, feeling rather proud to erect the first squad tents at Camp Mills.” They ate boiled beans, pork fat, and canned corned beef stew. “Men soon sickened from the greasy pork, and we were assaulted with an epidemic of boils. However, we persisted, and it was a happy day when the last squad tent was in place.”1 After the first night, Father Francis Duffy remarked, “We are tenting tonight on the Hempstead Plains, where Colonel Duffy and the old 69th encamped in 1898, when getting ready for 78 DUFFY’S WAR service in the Spanish War. It is a huge regiment now—bigger, I think, than the whole Irish brigade ever was in the Civil War.”2 As the regiment grew bigger, so did its problems. Men from other regiments poured into Mills, many of them angry because they had been booted out of their own outfits. They had enlisted with friends and expected to stay with them in their regiments. Being unceremoniously shipped off to the Sixty-ninth had not been part of their plans. One contributing regiment, the Seventy-first, had been organized in 1850 as the American Rifles (later called the American Guard) partly to counterbalance the militias formed by the Irish immigrants who flooded into the United States. The Seventy-first had a sterling record in the Civil War and the Spanish-American War, but that did not matter to the War Department. It emasculated the proud regiment , sending its men to shore up not only the 165th, but other regiments , most notably the newly created 105th and 106th Infantries. “We of the 71st are spiritualists,” said Robert Stewart Sutcliffe after the break up of his regiment. “We believe that the old 71st has a spirit—a tangible, live factor. That even though the regiment were wiped out of existence, by disbandment or disintegration, the spirit of the 71st, so interwoven with the history of the Country , the State and the City, would still live and have its influence.” He stressed, “When the old 71st was disintegrated in 1917 at Van Cortland Park and at Camp Wadsworth, the soul of the old regiment went marching on.”3 When the Seventy-first’s men arrived at Mills, they strode through camp with a “flea-bitten” Airedale named “Paddy Owen” and belted out “Tipperary,” claiming that from now on it was to be their marching song. Arthur Totten was one of the singing transfers who paraded right into the open arms of the 165th. A resident of 206 West 103rd Street, he had been sixteen when he joined the Seventyfirst . A descendant of Gen. Joseph Totten, for whom the fort at Willets Point in Bayside is named, Arthur’s great-grandfather was Anthony Bleeker, who had owned a farm in what is now the corner of Bleeker Street and West Broadway. Before the breakup, the men of the Seventy-first believed that because of its record, efficient discipline, and long history, it would be one of the first regiments to head for France. “This prophecy, however, was not to prove correct,” Sutcliffe duly noted. When orders called for three hundred and fifty men to...

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