Awaking from a leaden sleep, I saw the four corpses that the sappers had reached from underneath, hooking and then hauling them into the sap with ropes.  Each of them had several adjoining wounds, bullet-holes an inch or so apart—­the mitrailleuse had fired fast.  The body of Mesnil Andre was not found, and his brother Joseph did some mad escapades in search of it.  He went out quite alone into No Man’s Land, where the crossed fire of machine-guns swept it three ways at once and constantly.  In the morning, dragging himself along like a slug, he showed over the bank a face black with mud and horribly wasted.  They pulled him in again, with his face scratched by barbed wire, his hands bleeding, with heavy clods of mud in the folds of his clothes, and stinking of death.  Like an idiot be kept on saying, “He’s nowhere.”  He buried himself in a corner with his rifle, which he set himself to clean without hearing what was said to him, and only repeating “He’s nowhere.”

It is four nights ago since that night, and as the dawn comes once again to cleanse the earthly Gehenna, the bodies are becoming definitely distinct.

Barque in his rigidity seems immoderately long, his arms lie closely to the body, his chest has sunk, his belly is hollow as a basin.  With his head upraised by a lump of mud, he looks over his feet at those who come up on the left; his face is dark and polluted by the clammy stains of disordered hair, and his wide and scalded eyes are heavily encrusted with blackened blood.  Eudore seems very small by contrast, and his little face is completely white, so white as to remind you of the be-flowered face of a pierrot, and it is touching to see that little circle of white paper among the gray and bluish tints of the corpses.  The Breton Biquet, squat and square as a flagstone, appears to be under the stress of a huge effort; he might be trying to uplift the misty darkness; and the extreme exertion overflows upon the protruding cheek-bones and forehead of his grimacing face, contorts it hideously, sets the dried and dusty hair bristling, divides his jaws in a spectral cry, and spreads wide the eyelids from his lightless troubled eyes, his flinty eyes; and his hands are contracted in a clutch upon empty air.

Barque and Biquet were shot in the belly; Eudore in the throat.  In the dragging and carrying they were further injured.  Big Lamuse, at last bloodless, had a puffed and creased face, and the eyes were gradually sinking in their sockets, one more than the other.  They have wrapped him in a tent-cloth, and it shows a dark stain where the neck is.  His right shoulder has been mangled by several bullets, and the arm is held on only by strips of the sleeve and by threads that they have put in since.  The first night he was placed there, this arm hung outside the heap of dead, and the yellow hand, curled up on a lump of earth, touched passers-by in the face; so they pinned the arm to the greatcoat.

A pestilential vapor begins to hover about the remains of these beings with whom we lived so intimately and suffered so long.