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 only at the loopholes, unless in passing by, or under gold-laced caps.

Yes, we are truly and deeply different from each other.  But we are alike all the same.  In spite of this diversity of age, of country, of education, of position, of everything possible, in spite of the former gulfs that kept us apart, we are in the main alike.  Under the same uncouth outlines we conceal and reveal the same ways and habits, the same simple nature of men who have reverted to the state primeval.

The same language, compounded of dialect and the slang of workshop and barracks, seasoned with the latest inventions, blends us in the sauce of speech with the massed multitudes of men who (for seasons now) have emptied France and crowded together in the North-East.

Here, too, linked by a fate from which there is no escape, swept willy-nilly by the vast adventure into one rank, we have no choice but to go as the weeks and months go—­alike.  The terrible narrowness of the common life binds us close, adapts us, merges us one in the other.  It is a sort of fatal contagion.  Nor need you, to see how alike we soldiers are, be afar off—­at that distance, say, when we are only specks of the dust-clouds that roll across the plain.

We are waiting.  Weary of sitting, we get up, our joints creaking like warping wood or old hinges.  Damp rusts men as it rusts rifles; more slowly, but deeper.  And we begin again, but not in the same way, to wait.  In a state of war, one is always waiting.  We have become waiting-machines.  For the moment it is food we are waiting for.  Then it will be the post.  But each in its turn.  When we have done with dinner we will think about the letters.  After that, we shall set ourselves to wait for something else.

Hunger and thirst are urgent instincts which formidably excite the temper of my companions.  As the meal gets later they become grumblesome and angry.  Their need of food and drink snarls from their lips—­“That’s eight o’clock.  Now, why the hell doesn’t it come?”

“Just so, and me that’s been pining since noon yesterday,” sulks Lamuse, whose eyes are moist with longing, while his cheeks seem to carry great daubs of wine-colored grease-paint.