advanced in the wave of attack, and were caught on the flanks between the machine-guns posted to right and to left on the lines they had overshot.  It is some months now since death hollowed their eyes and consumed their cheeks, but even in those storm-scattered and dissolving remains one can identify the havoc of the machine-guns that destroyed them, piercing their backs and loins and severing them in the middle.  By the side of heads black and waxen as Egyptian mummies, clotted with grubs and the wreckage of insects, where white teeth still gleam in some cavities, by the side of poor darkening stumps that abound like a field of old roots laid bare, one discovers naked yellow skulls wearing the red cloth fez, whose gray cover has crumbled like paper.  Some thigh-bones protrude from the heaps of rags stuck together with reddish mud; and from the holes filled with clothes shredded and daubed with a sort of tar, a spinal fragment emerges.  Some ribs are scattered on the soil like old cages broken; and close by, blackened leathers are afloat, with water-bottles and drinking-cups pierced and flattened.  About a cloven knapsack, on the top of some bones and a cluster of bits of cloth and accouterments, some white points are evenly scattered; by stooping one can see that they are the finger and toe constructions of what was once a corpse.

Sometimes only a rag emerges from long mounds to indicate that some human being was there destroyed, for all these unburied dead end by entering the soil.

The Germans, who were here yesterday, abandoned their soldiers by the side of ours without interring them—­as witness these three putrefied corpses on the top of each other, in each other, with their round gray caps whose red edge is hidden with a gray band, their yellow-gray jackets, and their green faces.  I look for the features of one of them.  From the depth of his neck up to the tufts of hair that stick to the brim of his cap is just an earthy mass, the face become an anthill, and two rotten berries in place of the eyes.  Another is a dried emptiness flat on its belly, the back in tatters that almost flutter, the hands, feet, and face enrooted in the soil.

“Look!  It’s a new one, this—­”

In the middle of the plateau and in the depth of the rainy and bitter air, on the ghastly morrow of this debauch of slaughter, there is a head planted in the ground, a wet and bloodless head, with a heavy beard.

It is one of ours, and the helmet is beside it.  The distended eyelids permit a little to be seen of the dull porcelain of his eyes, and one lip shines like a slug in the shapeless beard.  No doubt he fell into a shell-hole, which was filled up by another shell, burying him up to the neck like the cat’s-head German of the Red Tavern at Souchez.

“I don’t know him,” says Joseph, who has come up very slowly and speaks with difficulty.

“I recognize him,” replies Volpatte.

“That bearded man?” says Joseph.