Several men were grouped at the end of the barracks. From them the
long row of cots, with here and there a man asleep or a man
hastily undressing, stretched, lighted by occasional feeble
electric-light bulbs, to the sergeant's little table beside the
door.

"You're gettin' a dis-charge, aren't you?" asked a man with a
brogue, and the red face of a jovial gorilla, that signified the
bartender.

"Yes, Flannagan, I am," said the lanky man dolefully.

"Ain't he got hard luck?" came a voice from the crowd.

"Yes, I have got hard luck, Buddy," said the lanky man, looking at
the faces about him out of sunken eyes. "I ought to be getting
forty dollars a week and here I am getting seven and in the army
besides."

"I meant that you were gettin' out of this goddam army."

"The army, the army, the democratic army," chanted someone under
his breath.

"But, begorry, I want to go overseas and 'ave a look at the 'uns,"
said Flannagan, who managed with strange skill to combine a
cockney whine with his Irish brogue.

"Overseas?" took up the lanky man. "If I could have gone an'
studied overseas, I'd be making as much as Kubelik. I had the