leeces and blankets and sacking wrap us
up, weigh us down, magnify us strangely. Some stretch themselves,
yawning profoundly. Faces appear, ruddy or leaden, dirt-disfigured,
pierced by the little lamps of dull and heavy-lidded eyes, matted with
uncut beards and foul with forgotten hair.

Crack! Crack! Boom!--rifle fire and cannonade. Above us and all around,
it crackles and rolls, in long gusts or separate explosions. The
flaming and melancholy storm never, never ends. For more than fifteen
months, for five hundred days in this part of the world where we are,
the rifles and the big guns have gone on from morning to night and from
night to morning. We are buried deep in an everlasting battlefield; but
like the ticking of the clocks at home in the days gone by--in the now
almost legendary Past--you only hear the noise when you listen.

A babyish face with puffy eyelids, and cheek-bones as lurid as if
lozenge-shaped bits of crimson paper had been stuck on, comes out of
the ground, opens one eye, then the other. It is Paradis. The skin of
his fat cheeks is scored with the marks of the folds in the tent-cloth
that has served him for night-cap. The glance of his little eye wanders
all round me; he sees me, nods, and says--"Another night gone, old
chap."

"Yes, sonny; how many more like it still?"

He raises his two plump arms skywards. He has managed to scrape out by
the steps of the dug-out and is beside me. After stumbling over the dim
obstacle of a man who sits in the shadows, fervently scratches himself
and sighs hoarsely, Paradis makes off--lamely splashing like a penguin
through the flooded picture.

One by one the men appear from the depths. In the corners, heavy
shadows are seen forming--human clouds that move and break up. One by
one they become recognizable. There is one who comes out hooded with
his blanket--a savage, you would say, or rather, the tent of a savage,
which walks and sways from side to side. Near by, and heavily framed in
knitted wool, a square face is disclosed, yellow-brown as though
iodized, and patterned with blackish patches, the nose broken, the eyes
of Chinese restriction and red-circled, a little coarse and moist
mustache like a greasing-brush.

"There's Volpatte. How goes it, Firmin?"

"It goes, it goes, and it comes," says Volpatte. His heavy and drawling
voice is aggravated by hoarseness. He coughs--"My number's up, this
time. Say, did you hear it last night, the attack? My boy, tal