It was indeed an old pattern, a sharpened flint hafted with an old brown bone—­quite a prehistoric tool in appearance.

“Very handy,” said Tulacque, fingering it.  “Yes, not badly thought out.  Better balanced than the regulation ax.  That’ll be useful to me, you’ll see.”  As he brandishes that ax of Post-Tertiary Man, he would himself pass for an ape-man, decked out with rags and lurking in the bowels of the earth.

One by one we gathered, we of Bertrand’s squad and the half-section, at an elbow of the trench.  Just here it is a little wider than in the straight part where when you meet another and have to pass you must throw yourself against the side, rub your back in the earth and your stomach against the stomach of the other.

Our company occupies, in reserve, a second line parallel.  No night watchman works here.  At night we are ready for making earthworks in front, but as long as the day lasts we have nothing 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.