With one exception I placed them as all under thirty. They were good-looking fellows in the main, who would respond amazingly to drill. After that impetus to the inner self, of which the Down and Out had the secret, plenty of work, a regular life, food, water, and sleep would renew them as the earth is renewed by spring. No missionary ever longed to bring a half-dozen promising pagans into the Christian fold more ardently than I to see these five or six poor wastrels transformed into fighting-men. For the minute there was no official there but little Spender, whose bliss in life was in opening the Down and Out door. Having led me across the empty front sitting-room, he said, as I stood in the gap of the folding-doors: “Say, brothers! This is Slim. Come in here four or five years ago, just as low down as any of you, and look at him now!” I did feel enormously tall, in spite of the high studding of the room, as well as enormously big in my ample military overcoat. To the six who sat in that woeful outward idleness, of which I knew the inner secret preoccupation, I must have been an astonishing apparition. Only a very commanding presence could summon these men from the desolate land into which their spirits were wandering; but for once in my life I did it. All eyes were fixed on me; every jaw dropped in a kind of awe. Knowing the habits and needs of such a stupor, I merely threw off my overcoat, entered, and sat down. Any greeting I made was general and offhand. Apart from that I sat and said nothing. I sat and said nothing because I knew it was what they liked. They liked the companionship, as babies and dogs like companionship, though their aching minds could not have responded to talk. There was no embarrassment in this silence, no expectation. It was a stupefied pleasure to them to stare at the uniform, to speculate inchoately as to the patch on my eye; and that little was enough. Nobody read; nobody smoked. I neither smoked nor read; I only sat as in a Quaker meeting, waiting for the first movement of the spirit. It came when a husky voice, that seemed to travel from across a gulf, said, without any particular reason, “I’m Spud.” I turned to my right, to see a good-looking, brown-eyed fellow, of perhaps twenty-eight, trying to reach me, as it were, with his pathetic, despairing gaze. I knew what was behind this self-introduction. The lost identity was trying to find itself; the man who was worthy of something was doing his utmost to get out of the abyss by reaching up his hands to the man who had got out. “All right, Spud,” I said, heartily. “Put it there! We’re going to be friends.” Silence for another five minutes was broken when a high voice recited in a sort of litany, “I’m Jimmy McKeever, traveler for Grubbe & Oates, gents’ furnishers.” Sharp-faced, wiry, catlike, agile, tough as wire, I could see this fellow creeping out into the darkness of No Man’s Land, and creeping back with information of the enemy.