Soldiers' wake-up call

Usage examples of reveille.

We lived eighteen men to a tent, near the high, steep bank of the Prut, with everything military: reveille, drills, field exercises, meals from a cauldron, tactics, and evening roll call.

Dogherty and his wife Bobby, CX-WAAF, unchallenged beauty queen of the station at Dungeness, who was well known to look like Betty Grable from behind and Phyllis Dixey from the front and to have a charm, a refreshing impertinence and a contempt for danger unrivalled, I am sure, by either of those famous pinups from Reveille.

If a leaf of the paper, which I warily, thievishly, moved, made but one rustle, how did that reveille boom through the haunted halls of my heart, and there was a cough in my swallow which for long I shirked to cough, till it burst with pitiless turbulence from my lips, sending crinkles of cold through my very soul: for with the words which I read were all mixed up visions of hearses crawling, palls, and wails, and crapes, and piercing shrieks of distraction pealing through vaults of catacombs, and all the mournfulness of that valley of shadow, and the tragedy of corruption.

Forte's contribution to World War II, it seemed, would be to stand watch four hours on and eight hours off, and sound Reveille, Mess Gear, Pay Call, Man Over­.

Reveille will be at oh-dark-thirty, so you'll have time to chow down before we leave.

Now, without electronic reveille electrically juicing up every fiber of his being, not to mention his body, at some repulsive early hour of the morning, he found that he could drift in the restful pools of somnolence for delirious long stretches, and so for awhile he did just that, putting paid to his sleep debt.

He split the time for reveille to taps into intervals and subintervals of ten thousand seconds, a thousand seconds, a hundred seconds, and memorized a conversion table.

Between 17 and 1715 hours every Friday when the 34th was not training in the field or on a deployment, the spotless barracks degraded into a trash dump, staying that way until Reveille Monday morning.

To this day, the smell of woods in the early morning reminds me of those long-ago dawns at Camp Upshur, with their shrill reveilles and screaming sergeants and dazed recruits stumbling out of bed.