Clerks, brokers, and business men have been turned into fighting devils. The Belgians were not out of their uniforms for days at a time. Sleeping and eating in the trenches when they could, they became veritable vagabonds. Even when catching a few winks of sleep the men lay with their rifles on their arms ready for action. JOKE WHILE BULLETS FLY The London _Daily Chronicle’s_ correspondent telegraphs the following from Havre: “‘I don’t know what has come over the German riflemen,’ an officer said to me to-day, ‘but our men have become almost totally indifferent to the German rifle fire. While it is going on they do their work singing, whistling and joking in the trenches.’ “An army doctor who heard this statement was able to confirm it in a remarkable way. Of 500 wounded who had come under his notice, or whom he had treated, only one was suffering from a rifle bullet wound. All the others had been hit by shrapnel bullets or bits of shells. “I met to-day a gunner who is in charge of a Maxim gun, and who at one time found himself right in the center and facing an oncoming German frontal attack. “‘But how we did mow them down,’ he said. ‘The section in front of me must have consisted of 800 men, and every one of them got something. We cleared the whole lot out, but from the flanks others closed up, and at last we had to run for it. We were forced to leave the gun behind, but, luckily, a well-planted German shell knocked it to bits before the Germans reached it.’” “AIM AT BUTTON, HIT GERMAN” Some striking stories told by wounded soldiers returning from France are given by the London _Standard_, among them the following: “The blue-gray uniforms of the Germans are hard to see at a distance,” said a Yorkshire light infantryman, “and for concealing movements are more effective than our khaki, but it is surprising how quickly you learn to pick out such things as buttons, badges, armlets, and even peaks of caps or spikes of helmets in the sun and tell by them of the moving men you cannot see otherwise. “Aim at a button a mile off and you hit a German in the stomach, is what we say, and it’s near enough to the truth. The Germans are such sticklers for rules that I have seen their artillery keep firing away at a position of ours after it had been occupied by their own men, and at the hospitals they find quite a number of Germans hit by their own rifle fire.” WHAT HAPPENED? GOD KNOWS! The London _Daily News_ prints a despatch from a staff correspondent describing the recent fighting around St. Quentin. The despatch written at St. Quentin and forwarded to London via Boulogne, reads: