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--

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