At his right sits Captain Sérin from Toulouse, the only Meridional at the table. He is very straightforward and uncomplicated, I should judge, as regards his psychology, with the rather objective eye of the man from the south. (They don’t dream the way we farther north do.) He sees a joke at any distance and is the sort, they tell me, who would obey as simply as he would breathe, without a thought of hesitation, an order unto death. The sort that when told to bring up reinforcements at a moment when it seems impossible, quite simply does it, and it only _happens_ to happen that he is living. He is not tall, but wide of shoulder, holding himself very straight, and on his breast there are ribbons, too. He is chief of the Gendarme Service, the first and last provost of Alsace reconquered. On the other side of Captain Bernard sits Captain Toussaint, chief of the Forestry Service of the Masevaux district, clad in bottle-green, with silver bugles on his collar and the Legion of Honor and other decorations on his breast, _d’une grande bonté_, his comrades tell me. He is from the north, from Douai (his brother was killed at the front), tall, slim, pale-faced, lantern-jawed, everything is in his eyes—in the _regard_, as some one said of him—and much of his life is passed alone in forests. So different from Captains Bernard and Lavallée, living in Paris, between whom he generally sits; and he nearly always comes in late from his forests for luncheon and dinner. “For Toussaint, Creation is represented by the first day when the heavens were formed, and everything that came afterward had something to do with forests,” some one said last night, as he was talking rather hotly about the war-time cutting down of the trees of France, and the influence the loss of forests had on the life of nations. _Très catholique_, also; but then these men of the Mission, with all of whom I have entered tabernacles, are of an extreme reverence. What they “believe” I know not. Lieutenant Laferrière sits sometimes by me, sometimes at the end of the table. He has early gray hair, a fresh complexion, gray-blue eyes with a certain inwardness of expression, a smiling movement of the lips when speaking, and, with all his wit, an extreme kindness in human judgments. Indeed, I am struck by something of softness and patience in the eyes of each one of these men to whom nothing of war is foreign, who have looked on all combinations of mortal anguish, and whose eyes at times, too, have had the red look, the hard, bright look of men who have just killed.