thing to do. Huddled up
together and linked arm in arm, it only remains to await the evening as
best we can.

Daylight has at last crept into the interminable crevices that furrow
this part of the earth, and now it finds the threshold of our holes. It
is the melancholy light of the North Country, of a restricted and muddy
sky, a sky which itself, one would say, is heavy with the smoke and
smell of factories. In this leaden light, the uncouth array of these
dwellers in the depths reveals the stark reality of the huge and
hopeless misery that brought it into being. But that is like the rattle
of rifles and the verberation of artillery. The drama in which we are
actors has lasted much too long for us to be surprised any more, either
at the stubbornness we have evolved or the garb we have devised against
the rain that comes from above, against the mud that comes from
beneath, and against the cold--that sort of infinity that is
everywhere. The skins of animals, bundles of blankets, Balaklava
helmets, woolen caps, furs, bulging mufflers (sometimes worn
turban-wise), paddings and quiltings, knittings and double-knittings,
coverings and roofings and cowls, tarred or oiled or rubbered, black or
all the colors (once upon a time) of the rainbow--all these things mask
and magnify the men, and wipe out their uniforms almost as effectively
as their skins. One has fastened on his back a square of linoleum, with
a big draught-board pattern in white and red, that he found in the
middle of the dining-room of some temporary refuge. That is Pepin. We
know him afar off by his harlequin placard sooner even than by his pale
Apache face. Here is Barque's bulging chest-protector, carven from an
eiderdown quilt, formerly pink, but now fantastically bleached and
mottled by dust and rain. There, Lamuse the Huge rises like a ruined
tower to which tattered posters still cling. A cuirass of moleskin,
with the fur inside, adorns little Eudore with the burnished back of a
beetle; while the golden corselet of Tulacque the Big Chief surpasses
all.

The "tin hat" gives a certain sameness to the highest points of the
beings that are there, but even then the divers ways of wearing it--on
the regulation cap like Biquet, over a Balaklava like Cadilhac, or on a
cotton cap like Barque--produce a complicated diversity of appearance.

And our legs! I went down just now, bent double, into our dug-out, the
little low cave that smells musty and damp, where one st