The West from a Car-Window by Richard Harding Davis

THE army posts of the United States are as different one from another as the stations along the line of a great railroad system. There is the same organization for all, and the highest officers govern one as well as the other; but in appearance and degree of usefulness and local rule they are as independent and yet as dependent, and as far apart in actual miles, as the Grand Central Depot in New York, with its twenty tracks and as many ticket-windows and oak-bound offices and greatest after-dinner orator, is distant from the section-house at the unfinished end of a road somewhere on the prairie. The commanding officer's quarters alone at Fort Sheridan cost thirty thousand dollars, and more than a million and a half has been spent on Fort Riley; but there are many other posts where nature supplied the mud and logs for the whole station, and the cost to the Government could not have been more than three hundred dollars at the most. It is consequently difficult to write in a general way of army posts. What is true of one is by no means true of another, and it will be better, perhaps, to first tell of those army posts which possess many features in common -- eight-company posts, for instance, which are not too large nor too small, not too near civilization, and yet not too far removed from the railroad. An eight-company post is a little town or community of about three hundred people living in a quadrangle around a parade-ground.

The scenery surrounding the quadrangle may differ as widely as you please to imagine it; it may be mountainous and beautiful, or level, flat, and unprofitable, but the parade-ground is always the same. It has a flag-pole at the entrance to the quadrangle, and a base-ball diamond marked out on the side on which the men live, and tennis-courts towards the officers' quarters. When you speak of the side of the square where the enlisted men live, you say "barracks," and you refer to the officers' share of the quadrangle as "the line. " In England you can safely say that an officer is living in barracks, but you must not say this of a United States officer; he lives in the third or fourth house up or down "the line."