Among my new comrades the differences due to birthplace were quickly noted. By the costume, the accent, or the general manner it was easy to identify the native of the Calvados, of Havre, or of Paris. Already these affinities played their unfailing rôle, and in the general bustle the groups formed according to their origin. In the meantime every face showed that species of childish joy which always marks the French when they abandon their individualities and become merged in a crowd, as in the army. Their naturally carefree spirit comes to the surface and colors all their thought and action. They cease to feel themselves responsible for the ordering of their lives, and leave all to the authority which controls them. This enables them to throw aside all thought of their immediate needs, and permits them, at whatever age, to recover a youthfulness of spirit which is a perpetual surprise to strangers, and which constitutes one of their chief racial charms. Released from all care, they jest freely on all subjects, and their spirit of quick repartee, their gifts of observation and of irony develop amazingly--perhaps to excess. They are just children, big children, full of life and gayety, who laugh at a joke and delight in a song; big children who will suffer every fatigue and every pain so long as they can retain their _esprit_, and whom one may lead into any danger if one knows how to provoke their good humor. War did not in the least change all this. While perhaps most of the troop had done little more than go through the motions of slumber, and every one had missed something of his customary comfort, no one seemed tired when next morning’s reveille came. Each improvised an occupation. One built a fire between two stones that he might heat water for the soup, another prepared vegetables, a third helped the quartermasters in their accounts, and still another volunteered to help arrange the uniforms which were heaped up in a barn commandeered to serve as a store-house. In a short time the issuing of uniforms commenced. In his turn each soldier received his clothing, his equipment and all the regulation baggage. And such scenes, half comic, half serious, as were enacted when the men tried on and adjusted their hurriedly assembled attire! Gradually, however, the long and short, the lean and rotund, by a series of exchanges, achieved a reasonable success in the transformation, and the variety of civilian aspect gave way to a soldierly uniformity.