Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 12, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 January 1918 — Kentuckians Are Ready and ‘Rarin’ To Go To Front [ARTICLE]

Kentuckians Are Ready and ‘Rarin’ To Go To Front

Louisville, Ky., Jan. 22.—The spell which moved a sailor of the torpedoed American destroyer Jacob Jones to shout to other sailor* who were struggling with' him in the sea, “Oh, boy! Where do we go from here?” is paralleled in instances among Kentucky drafted men. Ruby W. Franlin,a school-teacher of Madisonville, turned in a questionnaire of sixteen pages with a general answer of nine words: a “I want no exemption. Pershing IT be there,” he wrote across the face of the document Dave Raley, a young farmer of Hawesville, according to press re* Sorts, was quite as expressive when e said:

“I’m ready for service and rarin’ to go.” Henry DeHaven Moorman of Hardinsburg, commonwealth attorney of Breckinridge county, indicated hi* attitude when he said he “didn’t want to be an officer.” Anxiety to enter the army led him to Washington, where he enlisted the services of Senator Ollie James to expedite his acceptance in order that he might “get into the thickest of the fight ?n France” at the earliest moment. Senator James presented him to Adjutant General McCain, to whom the Kentuckian made his simple request. Although well over the draft age, he passed the examination incident to enlistment, promptly was assigned to the Tenth Field Artillery and ordered to Camp Green, N. C., for training. These isolated cases, however, perhaps are overshadowed by the patriotic behavior in two* Kentucky counties: In Larue the army exemption board recently announced that every man subject to the first draft had been found physically fit and that none had claimed exemption. In Breathitt, the former home of fueds and bloodshed, there were no men of draft age subject to the first call, because they all had volunteered, the exemption board said.