Under Fire Read Free Page B

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."
    "I heard it," declares the little Breton, Biquet; "I slept badly, or rather, didn't sleep. I've got a doss-house all to myself. Look, see, there it is--the damned thing." He points to a trough on the ground level, where on a meager mattress of muck, there is just body-room for one. "Talk about home in a nutshell!" he declares, wagging the rough and rock-hard little head that looks as if it had never been finished. "I hardly snoozed. I'd just got off, but was woke up by the relief of the 129th that went by--not by the noise, but the smell. Ah, all those chaps with their feet on the level with my nose! It woke me up, it gave me nose-ache so."
    I knew it. I have often been wakened in the trench myself by the trail of heavy smell in the wake of marching men.
    "It was all right, at least, if it killed the vermin," said Tirette.
    "On the contrary, it excites them," says Lamuse; "the worse you smell, the more you have of 'em."
    "And it's lucky," Biquet went on, "that their stink woke me up. As I was telling that great tub just now, I got my peepers open just in time to seize the tent-cloth that shut my hole up--one of those muck-heaps was going to pinch it off me."
    "Dirty devils, the 129th." The human form from which the words came could now be distinguished down below at our feet, where the morning had not yet reached it. Grasping his abundant clothing by handsful, he squatted and wriggled. It was Papa Blaire. His little eyes blinked among the dust that luxuriated on his face. Above the gap of his toothless mouth, his mustache made a heavy sallow lump. His hands were horribly black, the top of them shaggy with dirt, the palms plastered in gray relief. Himself, shriveled and dirtbedight,