First there are Gatts and Maggioni; Gatts, lean, tall, honest-eyed, with a grin that won’t come off and a quaint streak of humour,—Gatts who looks pure Yankee, but is, if the truth were told, three-quarters German,—Gatts who hangs about my counter hour after hour; and by his side sticks little Maggioni, who told the recruiting officer that he was seventeen but whose head just tops the canteen shelf, and who looks, with his pink cheeks and his great dark eyes, like nothing in the world but an Italian cupid in the sulks. The two have struck up the oddest comradeship. “Me an’ Gatts, we’re goin ’to stick side by side,” explains Maggioni, “an’ if I see a crowd o’ Germans pilin’ onto him, why I’ll just go right after ’em, an’ if too many of ’em come for me ter oncet, why Gatts here, he’ll just lay right into ’em.” And Gatts nods, looking down at Maggioni with a parent’s indulgent eye. “He thinks he’s a tough guy for sich a little feller,” he comments reflectively; “but he’s the only one in the regiment that knows it.” “You all think I’m mighty little!” snaps the cupid. “When I joined at Syracuse everybody said to me ‘Baby, where’d you leave your cradle?’ But lemme tell you, I’ve growed since I’ve been in the army!” “Waal I do believe there’s one part of him that’s growed;” Gatts is very solemn. “What’s that?” I ask. “His feet.” Private Gatts has promised me one of the Kaiser’s ears! Then there is Brady, “Devil Brady” the little black Irish coal-miner from Oklahoma, who spends his days trying to get put in the guard-house, so he won’t have to drill. “I’m plumb disgusted,” he confided to me today. “I never worked so hard in my life as I did the other night gettin’ drunk, an’ then the guard was so much drunker than I was, I had to carry him to the guard-house. I thought sure they’d give me thirty days at least, but they only kept me twenty-four hours and then out!” “Hard luck,” I sympathized. “I just knew how it would be,” he mourned. “It was Friday the thirteenth when I joined the army; there were just thirteen of us fellers, and the thirteenth was a nigger.” He tells me the most wonderful yarns about the miners and their pet rats, about explosions and disasters and rescue parties. Last night he told me the story of one mine-horror that will stick in my memory. “And we shoveled the last three men and a mule into one bag,” he finished.