The shock of his loss is aggravated by the spectacle that his remains present, for they are abominable to see.  Death has bestowed a grotesque look and attitude on the man who was so comely and so tranquil.  With his hair scattered over his eyes, his mustache trailing in his mouth, and his face swollen—­he is laughing.  One eye is widely open, the other shut, and the tongue lolls out.  His arms are outstretched in the form of a cross:  the hands open, the fingers separated.  The right leg is straight.  The left, whence flowed the hemorrhage that made him die, has been broken by a shell; it is twisted into a circle, dislocated, slack, invertebrate.  A mournful irony has invested the last writhe of his agony with the appearance of a clown’s antic.

We arrange him, and lay him straight, and tranquillize the horrible masks.  Volpatte has taken a pocket-book from him and places it reverently among his own papers, by the side of the portrait of his own wife and children.  That done, he shakes his head:  “He—­he was truly a good sort, old man.  When he said anything, that was the proof that it was true.  Ah, we needed him badly!”

“Yes,” I said, “we had need of him always.”

“Ah, la, la!” murmurs Volpatte. and he trembles.  Joseph repeats in a weak voice, “Ah, nom de Dieu!  Ah, nom de Dieu!”

The plateau is as covered with people as a public square; fatigue-parties in detachments, and isolated men.  Here and there, the stretcher-bearers are beginning (patiently and in a small way) their huge and endless task.

Volpatte leaves us, to return to the trench and announce our new losses, and above all the great gap left by Bertrand.  He says to Joseph, “We shan’t lose sight of you, eh?  Write us a line now and again—­just, ‘All goes well; signed, Camembert,’ eh?” He disappears among the people who cross each other’s path in the expanse now completely possessed by a mournful and endless rain.

Joseph leans on me and we go down into the ravine.  The slope by which we descend is known as the Zouaves’ Cells.  In the May attack, the Zouaves had all begun to dig themselves individual shelters, and round these they were exterminated.  Some are still seen, prone on the brim of an incipient hole, with their trenching-tools in their fleshless hands or looking at them with the cavernous hollows where shrivel the entrails of eyes.  The ground is so full of dead that the earth-falls uncover places that bristle with feet, with half-clothed skeletons, and with ossuaries of skulls placed side by side on the steep slope like porcelain globe-jars.

In the ground here there are several strata of dead and in many places the delving of the shells has brought out the oldest and set them out in display on the top of the new ones.  The bottom of the ravine is completely carpeted with debris of weapons, clothing, and implements.  One tramples shell fragments, old iron, loaves and even biscuits that have fallen from knapsacks and are not yet dissolved by the rain.  Mess-tins, pots of jam. and helmets are pierced and riddled by bullets—­the scrapings and scum of a hell-broth; and the dislocated posts that survive are stippled with holes.