Terry, thanks for the response.

With regard to the rifles being "shipped from duty station to duty station," I certainly understand that you were told that and there should be no reflection on you whatsoever. My purpose in posting was simply to correct that notion, because it didn't happen. There have been things said and written about Willard Levin and about his importation of the Remington 1903 rifles that are incorrect. Some of these things are trivial and don't matter and I would put this "duty station shipping" stuff into the trivial column. Having said this, I obviously hate to see some of these things perpetuated, even though trivial.

Re: the "straw." I have never been real comforatble with the use of the word "straw" because, like you, I envision straw material being long straight stems that are hollow. I felt that the use of "straw" in the "Man At Arms" article was about the best description of the material that we saw without going into a long winded discussion of what it looked like. While I agree with Jim Tarletonicon that the photos posted by Rick seem to show wood shavings, what I saw mostly was dried grass that looked like it came from my Coastal Bermuda field. Coastal Bermuda is a grass that has long runners with branches of leaves and stems coming off the runners. Jim will certainly know what Coastal looks like.

While I'm picking around with corrections, as I recall, the sale though Red Star was 5 crates, not 6, and Will Levin held a few rifles back out of those 5 crates.

I find it strange that the crates at Red Star were packed full of "straw" when the crates that I have seen opened show only remnants of "straw" on the cosmolineicon of the rifles. The rifles were crated at the same time for shipment to Will Levin. They were shipped in two shipments, but the second bunch was simply held in storage at Pall Mall Depositories, London, until Will Levin directed them to ship. Why would the crates be packed differently? You could speculate that they may have been packed at two separarte depots, but I think that unlikely with an order of 200 rifles.