Harvard Men Brave Elements To Serve With State Militia

Six determined Harvard students whose duty to country and state precluded any possibility of registering at College before the grim deadline last Monday returned triumphantly from the floodtorn shores of Buzzards Bay yesterday but not too well convinced that army life is the best of all.

Marooned amidst the wreckage of Cape Cod homes for nearly a week while serving with the National Guards, the youths whose military swagger lacked the finesse of their older associates admitted a longing for the leisure of Cambridge life.

The five were interviewed at their desolated posts near Falmouth just before a downpour drenched their slick brown uniforms. Scornfully superior to members of the infantry who carried heavy rifles and shiny bayonets, the Harvard doughboys brandished nightsticks as official members of the artillery division 101, Battery A.

The outfit, quartered at Bourne, had taken possession of the neighboring towns, and boasted free access to the motion pictures houses in their spare time. They were on six hours and off 1-2 and felt the 12 to 6 o'clock watch in the early morning the worst.

Corporal Henry Finch of Roslindale took the CRIMSON staff car through rows of sentries who kept vandals from the devastated areas to the sand banks where some of the Harvard men were on guard. "We are shifted all around," said Seargent Geoffrey W. Lewis '34, former tutor and assistant dean, "sometimes we're on a highway, sometimes in a cranberry bog."

The most warlike event of the whole affair, they said, was discovering the bloated body of a "Mrs. Jones" in a flooded garage. They all agreed that they had "the best cook in the brigade." It turned out he was the chef at the "Chez Paris" restaurant in Brookline.

Lewis said he had been aroused out of bed at 6:45 o'clock Saturday morning to report for service with the Guardsmen and that the Undergraduates had been called at the same time. Those who grabbed their uniforms for the first truck included I. Tucker Burr 3rd '39, Graham B. Blaine, Jr., '40, John Hoar. Jr. '40, Paul G. Counihan '39, John T. Coolidge, 3rd '41, and Malcolm Marshall '41