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.
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