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, talk about a bombardment—­something very choice in the way of mixtures!” He sniffles and passes his sleeve under his concave nose.  His hand gropes within his greatcoat and his jacket till it finds the skin, and scratches.  “I’ve killed thirty of them in the candle,” he growls; “in the big dug-out by the tunnel, mon vieux, there are some like crumbs of metal bread.  You can see them running about in the straw like I’m telling you.”

“Who’s been attacking?  The Boches?”

“The Boches and us too—­out Vimy way—­a counterattack—­didn’t you hear it?”

“No,” the big Lamuse, the ox-man, replies on my account; “I was snoring; but I was on fatigue all night the night before.”