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."