“I’m coming,” says bustling Bertrand, who keeps going both day and night.

“What then?” says Pepin, always hot-headed.  “I don’t feel like chewing macaroni again; I shall open a tin of meat in less than two secs?” The daily comedy of dinner steps to the front again in this drama.

“Don’t touch your reserve rations!” says Bertrand; “as soon as I’m back from seeing the captain I’ll get you something.”

When he returns he brings and distributes a salad of potatoes and onions, and as mastication proceeds our features relax and our eyes become composed.

For the ceremony of eating, Paradis has hoisted a policeman’s hat.  It is hardly the right place or time for it, but the hat is quite new, and the tailor, who promised it for three months ago, only delivered it the day we came up.  The pliant two-cornered hat of bright blue cloth on his flourishing round head gives him the look of a pasteboard gendarme with red-painted cheeks.  Nevertheless, all the while he is eating, Paradis looks at me steadily.  I go up to him.  “You’ve a funny old face.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he replies.  “I want a chat with you.  Come with me and see something.”

His hand goes out to his half-full cup placed beside his dinner things; he hesitates, and then decides to put his wine in a safe place down his gullet, and the cup in his pocket.  He moves off and I follow him.

In passing he picks up his helmet that gapes on the earthen bench.  After a dozen paces he comes close to me and says in a low voice and with a queer air, without looking at me—­as he does when he is upset—­“I know where Mesnil Andre is.  Would you like to see him?  Come, then.”

So saying, he takes off his police hat, folds and pockets it. and puts on his helmet.  He sets off again and I follow him without a word.

He leads me fifty yards farther, towards the place where our common dug-out is, and the footbridge of sandbags under which one always slides with the impression that the muddy arch will collapse on one’s back.  After the footbridge, a hollow appears in the wall of the trench, with a step made of a hurdle stuck fast in the clay.  Paradis climbs there, and motions to me to follow him on to the narrow and slippery platform.  There was recently a sentry’s loophole here, and it has been destroyed and made again lower down with a couple of bullet-screens.  One is obliged to stoop low lest his head rise above the contrivance.

Paradis says to me, still in the same low voice, “It’s me that fixed up those two shields, so as to see—­for I’d got an idea, and I wanted to see.  Put your eye to this—­”

“I don’t see anything; the hole’s stopped up.  What’s that lump of cloth?”

“It’s him,” says Paradis.

Ah!  It was a corpse, a corpse sitting in a hole, and horribly near—­