"Only my sister's son, monsieur."

"In the active forces?"

"No, he is a reservist. He is a man thirty-five years of age. He was
wounded by a shrapnel ball in the groin early in the spring, but is now
at the front again."

"What does he do en civil?"

"He is a furniture-maker, monsieur."

He showed no sign of unrest at my catechizing, and plodded off down the
green velvet carpet to the landing-stage of the elevator. In the street
below a crowd was coming out of the silky white radiance of the lobby of
a cinema into the violet rays thrown upon the sidewalk from the
illuminated sign over the theater door. There are certain French cities
to which the war has brought a real prosperity, and Nancy was then one
of them. The thousands of refugees from the frontier villages and the
world of military officials and soldier workmen mobilized in the
ammunition factories had added to the population till it was actually
greater than it had been before the war, and with this new population
had come a development of the city's commercial life. The middle class
was making money, the rich were getting richer, and Nancy, hardly more
than eighteen or nineteen miles from the trenches, forgot its danger
till, on the first day of January, 1916, the Germans fired several
shells from a giant mortar or a marine piece into the town, one of which
scattered the fragments of a big five-story apartment house all over
Nancy. And on that afternoon thirty thousand people left the city.