Bill Accepted for Service
“We arrived in Paris, where I was kept for several weeks at headquarters. One night I returned home in Paris and informed Bill that I had been assigned to the First Division and ordered up to the front. Bill was delighted and ready to put off at once, and, although it seemed impossible to me, it never feazed him.
“It never occurred to Bill that he was a civilian in France, with no military connection whatever, and that it would be impossible for a civilian to accompany me to the front. In this dilemma I placed the situation before Colonel Malin Craig. He is a general now, and it made a strong appeal to him. He wanted to make Bill a captain of military police, but Bill would have none of that. He wanted to get to the front, and to the front we started.
“Together we arrived within seven miles of the front line before Bill was finally held up. He had come 7,000 miles on his own responsibility, without one line of authority from any one, and was now actually at the front and in the face of the enemy, and was still a civilian. And it was there in the Toul sector that Bill enlisted and became officially what he had been at heart and in fact for many weeks—one of the American Expeditionary Force.
“From then on Bill and I were together without danger of being separated by army regulations. He became my orderly and remained so throughout. The only time we were separated was when Bill was in the hospital recovering from shell-wounds. We came back together and Bill went with me to Hot Springs, Ark., where we both took baths. We separated at Fort Worth, Bill going on to Ajo by another route, while I came on to Bisbee.”
And that is the story of Bill Davidson, whose devotion to his chief is unlimited. It causes him to “do the impossible” and to override all of the regulations of the War Department. It is a story in the telling of which Colonel Greenway takes the greatest pride and in which a spirit of affection is dominant.
Bill quit his job to go to war with Jack Greenway, and he did.
The original Selective Service Law of May 18, 1917, with its subsequent amendments, mobilized the man-power of the United States, between the ages of 18 and 45 inclusive. Under the original and later acts, approximately 23,709,000 men were registered and slightly over 2,800,000 were inducted into the military service.