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.