Around the dead flutter letters that have escaped from pockets or cartridge pouches while they were being placed on the ground.  Over one of these bits of white paper, whose wings still beat though the mud ensnares them, I stoop slightly and read a sentence—­“My dear Henry, what a fine day it is for your birthday!” The man is on his belly; his loins are rent from hip to hip by a deep furrow; his head is half turned round; we see a sunken eye; and on temples, cheek and neck a kind of green moss is growing.

A sickening atmosphere roams with the wind around these dead and the heaped-up debris, that lies about them—­tent-cloth or clothing in stained tatters, stiff with dried blood, charred by the scorch of the shell, hardened, earthy and already rotting, quick with swarming and questing things.  It troubles us.  We look at each other and shake our heads, nor dare admit aloud that the place smells bad.  All the same, we go away slowly.

Now come breaking out of the fog the bowed backs of men who are joined together by something they are carrying.  They are Territorial stretcher-bearers with a new corpse.  They come up with their old wan faces, toiling, sweating, and grimacing with the effort.  To carry a dead man in the lateral trenches when they are muddy is a work almost beyond human power.  They put down the body, which is dressed in new clothes.

“It’s not long since, now, that he was standing,” says one of the bearers.  “It’s two hours since he got his bullet in the head for going to look for a Boche rifle in the plain.  He was going on leave on Wednesday and wanted to take a rifle home with him.  He is a sergeant of the 405th, Class 1914.  A nice lad, too.”

He takes away the handkerchief that is over the face.  It is quite young, and seems to sleep, except that an eyeball has gone, the cheek looks waxen, and a rosy liquid has run over the nostrils, mouth, and eyes.

The body strikes a note of cleanliness in the charnel-house, this still pliant body that lolls its head aside when it is moved as if to lie better; it gives a childish illusion of being less dead than the others.  But being less disfigured, it seems more pathetic, nearer to one, more intimate, as we look.  And had we said anything in the presence of all that heap of beings destroyed, it would have been “Poor boy!”

We take the road again, which at this point begins to slope down to the depth where Souchez lies.  Under our feet in the whiteness of the fog it appears like a valley of frightful misery.  The piles of rubbish, of remains and of filthiness accumulate on the shattered spine of the road’s paving and on its miry borders in final confusion.  The trees bestrew the ground or have disappeared, torn away, their stumps mangled.  The banks of the road are overturned and overthrown by shell-fire.  All the way along, on both sides of this highway where only the crosses remain standing, are trenches twenty times blown in and re-hollowed, cavities—­some with passages into them—­hurdles on quagmires.