An immigrant to the U.S., Monaghan's father brags about his "Shanty Irish" origins, but at the time of the story, he is a self-made millionaire who began his rise to wealth by collecting refuse and finally by building municipal sewage systems. Monaghan quotes him: "When you're with your fine friends, the fathers and mothers and sisters of them you met at Yale, ye might just remind them that every man is the slave of his own refuse and so your old dad they would be sending around to the forty-story back doors of their kitchens is the king of them all" (415).
Bland has apparently invented an imaginary wife for his own neurotic reasons. The narrator reports "when [Bland] was tight he would talk about his wife, though we all knew that he was not married" (408). In the story's last line, he refers to her as his "poor little wife" (429).
In the Cloche-Close, a French officer, "tall, with a gaunt, tragic face," implies that Monaghan and the military policeman should remove the German prisoner from the premises (422). The officer has a glass eye, probably as a result of the war; it is described as "motionless, rigid in a face that looked even deader than the spurious eye" (422).
The patronne is the manager and owner of the Cloche-Clos. An old woman who wears steel spectacles and knits, she thoroughly understands the threat posed to her business by the Allied aviators and their German prisoner. She loudly expresses her outrage that this German - whom she calls a "Boche!" (422) - has been brought into her bistro: "Eight months since the obus I have kept them in a box against this day: plates, cups, saucers, glasses, all that I have had since thirty years, all gone, broken at one time!
The waiter at the Cloche-Clos is "an old man in a dirty apron"; when he notices the German prisoner in the bistro, he falls "back before us, slack-jawed, with an expression of outraged unbelief, like an atheist confronted with either Christ or the devil" (411). The last we see of him is amidst the chaos of the brawl that breaks out; at its climax, Comyn is seen carrying or dragging this "ancient waiter" "beneath his arm" (424).
As an American military policeman (A.M.P.), this unnamed character competes with Monaghan for control over the German prisoner. Mystified by the company of headstrong and independent aviators in which he finds himself, he insultingly asserts his authority over the French officer at the Cloche-Clos in Amiens, thus helping to bring on the riot. The French officer calls him a "devil-dog" - a World War I era slang term for a U.S. Marine (422).
