It is a fantastic road enough, in truth.  On both sides of it are crouching armies, and their missiles have mingled on it for a year and a half.  It is a great disheveled highway, traveled only by bullets and by ranks and files of shells, that have furrowed and upheaved it, covered it with the earth of the fields, scooped it and laid bare its bones.  It might be under a curse; it is a way of no color, burned and old, sinister and awful to see.

“If you’d only known it—­how clean and smooth it was!” says Poterloo.  “All sorts of trees were there, and leaves, and colors—­like butterflies; and there was always some one passing on it to give good-day to some good woman rocking between two baskets, or people shouting [note 1] to each other in a chaise, with the good wind ballooning their smocks.  Ah, how happy life was once on a time!”

He dives down to the banks of the misty stream that follows the roadway towards the land of parapets.  Stooping, he stops by some faint swellings of the ground on which crosses are fixed—­tombs, recessed at intervals into the wall of fog, like the Stations of the Cross in a church.

I call him—­we shall never get there at such a funeral pace.  Allons!

We come to a wide depression in the land, I in front and Poterloo lagging behind, his head confused and heavy with thought as he tries in vain to exchange with inanimate things his glances of recognition.  Just there the road is lower, a fold secretes it from the side towards the north.  On this sheltered ground there is a little traffic.

Along the hazy, filthy, and unwholesome space, where withered grass is embedded in black mud, there are rows of dead.  They are carried there when the trenches or the plain are cleared during the night.  They are waiting—­some of them have waited long—­to be taken back to the cemeteries after dark.

We approach them slowly.  They are close against each other, and each one indicates with arms or legs some different posture of stiffened agony.  There are some with half-moldy faces, the skin rusted, or yellow with dark spots.  Of several the faces are black as tar, the lips hugely distended—­the heads of negroes blown out in goldbeaters’ skin.  Between two bodies, protruding uncertainly from one or the other, is a severed wrist, ending with a cluster of strings.

Others are shapeless larvae of pollution, with dubious items of equipment pricking up, or bits of bone.  Farther on, a corpse has been brought in in such a state that they have been obliged—­so as not to lose it on the way—­to pile it on a lattice of wire which was then fastened to the two ends of a stake.  Thus was it carried in the hollow of its metal hammock, and laid there.  You cannot make out either end of the body; alone, in the heap that it makes, one recognizes the gape of a trouser-pocket.  An insect goes in and out of it.