There are long ditches in maze where the residue at night accumulates. This is the trench. The bottom is lined with a viscous layer from which the foot peels off at each step with noise, and which smells bad around each shelter, because of the urine of the night. The holes themselves, if you look at them in passing, also stink, like mouths. I see shadows emerge from these side wells, and move, masses huge and misshapen: species of wading and snarling bears. It's us. We are bundled up like arctic people. Wool, blankets, sackcloths, pack us, overcome us, strangely round us. Some people stretch, vomit yawns. We perceive figures, glowing or livid, with dirt that scars them, pierced by the night-lights of scrambled eyes and glued to the edge, covered with unsprung beards or clogged with unshaven hair. Tac! Tac! Pan! The gunshots, the cannonade. Above us, everywhere, it crackles or rolls, in long gusts or in separate blows. The dark and blazing storm never ceases, never.
For more than fifteen months, for five hundred days, in this place of the world where we are, the shooting and the bombardment did not stop from morning to evening and from evening to morning. We are buried at the bottom of an eternal battlefield; but like the ticking of the clocks of our houses, in the days of yore, in the almost legendary past, we only hear this when we listen. A puppet's face, with puffy eyelids, cheekbones so crimson that it looks like we have glued small diamonds of red paper, comes out of the ground, opens one eye, both; it's Paradise. The skin of his big cheeks is streaked by the traces of the folds of the tent canvas in which he slept with his head wrapped. He looks around with his little eyes, sees me, beckons me and says: - Again one night past, my poor old man. --Yes, son, how many such will we still pass? He raises to the sky his two bulging arms. He scrambled out of the staircase of the guitar, and here he was next to me. After having tripped over the obscure heap of a man sitting on the ground, in the dark, and who is scratching energetically with raucous sighs, Paradis is moving away, lapping, chugging, like a penguin, in the diluvian setting. Little by little, men detach themselves from the depths.
