Having flattened my face against the steel plate and glued my eye to the hole in the bullet-screen, I saw all of it.  He was squatting, the head hanging forward between the legs, both arms placed on his knees, his hands hooked and half closed.  He was easily identifiable—­so near, so near!—­in spite of his squinting and lightless eyes, by the mass of his muddy beard and the distorted mouth that revealed the teeth.  He looked as if he were both smiling and grimacing at his rifle, stuck straight up in the mud before him.  His outstretched hands were quite blue above and scarlet underneath, crimsoned by a damp and hellish reflection.

It was he, rain-washed and besmeared with a sort of scum, polluted and dreadfully pale, four days dead, and close up to our embankment into which the shell-hole where he had burrowed had bitten.  We had not found him because he was too near!

Between this derelict dead in its unnatural solitude and the men who inhabited the dug-out there was only a slender partition of earth, and I realize that the place in it where I lay my head corresponds to the spot buttressed by this dreadful body.

I withdraw my face from the peep-hole and Paradis and I exchange glances.  “Mustn’t tell him yet,” my companion whispers.  “No, we mustn’t, not at once—­” “I spoke to the captain about rooting him out, and he said, too, we mustn’t mention it now to the lad.’” A light breath of wind goes by.  “I can smell it!”—­“Rather!” The odor enters our thoughts and capsizes our very hearts.

“So now,” says Paradis, “Joseph’s left alone, out of six brothers.  And I’ll tell you what—­I don’t think he’ll stop long.  The lad won’t take care of himself—­he’ll get himself done in.  A lucky wound’s got to drop on him from the sky, otherwise he’s corpsed.  Six brothers—­it’s too bad, that!  Don’t you think it’s too bad?” He added, “It’s astonishing that he was so near us.”

“His arm’s just against the spot where I put my head.”

“Yes,” says Paradis, “his right arm, where there’s a wrist-watch.”

The watch—­I stop short—­is it a fancy, a dream?  It seems to me—­yes, I am sure now—­that three days ago, the night when we were so tired out, before I went to sleep I heard what sounded like the ticking of a watch and even wondered where it could come from.

“It was very likely that watch you heard all the same, through the earth,” says Paradis, whom I have told some of my thoughts; “they go on thinking and turning round even when the chap stops.  Damn, your own ticker doesn’t know you—­it just goes quietly on making little circles.”

I asked, “There’s blood on his hands; but where was be hit?”

“Don’t know; in the belly, I think; I thought there was something dark underneath him.  Or perhaps in the face—­did you notice the little stain on the cheek?”

I recall the hairy and greenish face of the dead man.  “Yes, there was something on the cheek.  Yes, perhaps it went in there—­”