I get under way with Joseph, who walks very slowly, a little paler
than usual, and still taciturn. Now and again he halts, and his face
twitches. We follow the communication trenches, and a comrade
appears suddenly. It is Volpatte, and he says, "I'm going with you
to the foot of the hill." As he is off duty, he is wielding a
magnificent twisted walking-stick, and he shakes in his hand like
castanets the precious pair of scissors that never leaves him.
All three of us come out of the communication trench when the slope
of the land allows us to do it without danger of bullets--the guns
are not firing. As soon as we are outside we stumble upon a
gathering of men. It is raining. Between the heavy legs planted
there like little trees on the gray plain in the mist we see a dead
man. Volpatte edges his way in to the horizontal form upon which
these upright ones are waiting; then he turns round violently and
shouts to us, "It's Pepin!"
"Ah!" says Joseph, who is already almost fainting. He leans on me
and we draw near. Pepin is full length, his feet and hands
bent and shriveled, and his rain-washed face is swollen and horribly
gray.
A man who holds a pickax and whose sweating face is full of little
black trenches, recounts to us the death of Pepin: "He'd gone
into a funk-hole where the Boches had planked themselves, and behold
no one knew he was there and they smoked the hole to make sure of
cleaning it out, and the poor lad, they found him after the
operation, corpsed, and all pulled out like a cat's innards in the
middle of the Boche cold meat that he'd stuck--and very nicely stuck
too, I may say, seeing I was in business as a butcher in the suburbs
of Paris.
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