DIY History | Transcribe | World War I Diaries and Letters | Robert Morriss Browning correspondence to Mabel C. Williams, July-December 1918 | 1918-10-21 Robert M. Browning to Dr. Mabel C. Williams Page 3

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Robert Morriss Browning correspondence to Mabel C. Williams, July-December 1918

1918-10-21 Robert M. Browning to Dr. Mabel C. Williams Page 3

successful in scaring me sleepless. I know how mothers feel when their sons go to war, now.
Well, our division is hoping to leave within a couple of weeks but we don't know for sure. They have gone and named us the "Plymouth Division." Since two of the four infantry regiments, the 36th & 42nd, are Regulars, recruited from all over the country but chiefly from the South & Middle West, and have only a few conscripts from New England and these mostly Italians & Lithuanians who don't savvy Enlish, the name doesn't appeal to us very strongly. The 73rd & 74th regiments are conscripts from New England but they have thirty or forty men to a company that they got from the regulars as a nucleus and their officers are drawn from all over so that the name is not especially popular with the officers of those outfits either. we call ourselves "Plymouth Rocks," but don't crow over it much. In fact it makes us want to cackle when we think of the Puritanical name being applied to some of our hard boiled birds from the regulars, born in Chicago or Tennessee or Oklahoma who have soldiered in the Islands and on the border until the Puritan ideas suggested by "Plymouth" hardly seem to fit.
It's nearly one o'clock now & I have to do a bit of sleeping before reveille so I'll say goodnight. I must have my sleep. Early to bed and early to rise - "that's me all over, Mable." Cheerfully, Bob

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successful in scaring me sleepless. I know how mothers feel when their sons go to war, now. Well, our division is hoping to leave within a couple of weeks but we don't know for sure. They have gone and named us the "Plymouth Division." Since two of the four infantry regiments, the 36th & 42nd, are Regulars, recruited from all over the country but chiefly from the South & Middle West, and have only a few conscripts from New England and these mostly Italians & Lithuanians who don't savvy Enlish, the name doesn't appeal to us very strongly. The 73rd & 74th regiments are conscripts from New England but they have thirty or forty men to a company that they got from the regulars as a nucleus and their officers are drawn from all over so that the name is not especially popular with the officers of those outfits either. we call ourselves "Plymouth Rocks," but don't crow over it much. In fact it makes us want to cackle when we think of the Puritanical name being applied to some of our hard boiled birds from the regulars, born in Chicago or Tennessee or Oklahoma who have soldiered in the Islands and on the border until the Puritan ideas suggested by "Plymouth" hardly seem to fit. It's nearly one o'clock now & I have to do a bit of sleeping before reveille so I'll say goodnight. I must have my sleep. Early to bed and early to rise - "that's me all over, Mable." Cheerfully, Bob