daubed carts with paint--and without grumbling, they say. Tulacque
was barman at the Throne Tavern in the suburbs; and Eudore of the
pale and pleasant face kept a roadside cafe not very far from
the front lines. It has been ill-used by the shells--naturally, for
we all know that Eudore has no luck. Mesnil Andre, who still
retains a trace of well-kept distinction, sold bicarbonate and
infallible remedies at his pharmacy in a Grande Place. His brother
Joseph was selling papers and illustrated story-books in a station
on the State Railways at the same time that, in far-off Lyons,
Cocon, the man of spectacles and statistics, dressed in a black
smock, busied himself behind the counters of an ironmongery, his
hands glittering with plumbago; while the lamps of Becuwe
Adolphe and Poterloo, risen with the dawn, trailed about the
coalpits of the North like weakling Will-o'-th'-wisps.

And there are others amongst us whose occupations one can never
recall, whom one confuses with one another; and the rural
nondescripts who peddled ten trades at once in their packs, without
counting the dubious Pepin, who can have had none at all.
(While at the depot after sick leave, three months ago, they say, he
got married--to secure the separation allowance.)

The liberal professions are not represented among those around me.
Some teachers are subalterns in the company or Red Cross men. In the
regiment a Marist Brother is sergeant in the Service de
Sante; a professional tenor is cyclist dispatch-rider to the
Major; a "gentleman of independent means" is mess corporal to the
C.H.R. But here there is nothing of all that. We are fighting men,
we others, and we include hardly any intellectuals, or men of the
arts or of wealth, who during this war will have risked their faces