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To the Second Army's hard-bitten infantry outfits this would have been a breeze. To the truck drivers, clerks, typists, mechanics of the 110th it was no such thing. But the General had spoken.
Next day, the hottest day in two years (97°), the trucks rumbled off, crossed the river, stopped beyond in the Arkansas flats, let all but the drivers out. Five miles ahead the drivers stopped, got out, started to march. Through the morning and afternoon, the trucks were leapfrogged, until everybody had had his dose. One man. just out of the hospital at Camp Forrest, Tenn., soon fell out, was trucked into Camp Robinson. During the day about twelve others fell out, were picked up. The stragglers and heat-stricken took emergency treatment from a dentist and a sanitary officer who were also being disciplined. The rest ate plenty of salt against the heat, filled their canteens silently at wayside towns, while the citizenry eyed them with sympathy.
But the 110th's Battalion took the whole business as soldiers should. When civilians were not around, they laughed and kidded, sang snatches of songs, tried to improvise on an old theme—"General Lear he missed his putt, Parley Voo—. . ." And when they finally got back home they grinned at the gibes of other soldiers. They did not seem to feel that they had disgraced the Army.
Goat v. Rowdies. Neither did some Congressmen, who roundly trounced Ben Lear, off & on the floor. Texas' Paul J. Kilday sent a hot wire to the General, demanding an explanation. Ben Lear replied: "I am responsible for the training of all elements of this Army. . . . Rowdyism can not be tolerated. . . . Circumstances called for immediate action." Arkansas's William F. Norrell demanded a Congressional investigation ("He apparently is engaged all the time in playing golf"). Illinois's Everett M. Dirksen said he did not know "whether public funds are to be expended so that grouchy, golfing old generals will develop a lot of sourpuss soldiers." Missouri's isolationist Senator Bennett Champ Clark called Ben Lear "a superannuated old goat, who ought to retire."
The controversy spread like a heat wave. The Arkansas Department of the Army Mothers' Club demanded Ben Lear's removal. The Knoxville (Tenn.) News-Sentinel printed a letter from an Army mother ("Maybe General Lear got his rule books mixed and read the one for Russia") and the paper invited its readers to say more about the Memphis Incident. Cantankerous Westbrbok Pegler defended Ben Lear on the probability that "the obstreperous haberdashers and grocers" of the Quartermaster outfit had used lewd language to Memphis' shorts-clad girls—an unfair, and also incorrect assumption.
The hubbub became so regrettably loud that the Army had to act. From Washington it announced that Ben Lear had been ordered to make an explanation. Until it arrived, the Army would say nothing. Under the circumstances there was not much to say. Ben Lear might well have been oversevere: his sentence had the stigma of capricious anger, wounded vanity. But his objective—better discipline—was good. Many an officer thought it better to forget the whole business than make a nationwide song & dance about it.