The more we go forward, the more is everything turned terribly inside out, full of putrefaction, cataclysmic.  We walk on a surface of shell fragments, and the foot trips on them at every step.  We go among them as if they were snares, and stumble in the medley of broken weapons or bits of kitchen utensils, of water-bottles, fire-buckets, sewing-machines, among the bundles of electrical wiring, the French and German accouterments all mutilated and encrusted in dried mud, and among the sinister piles of clothing, stuck together with a reddish-brown cement.  And one must look out, too, for the unexploded shells, which everywhere protrude their noses or reveal their flanks or their bases, painted red, blue, and tawny brown.

“That’s the old Boche trench, that they cleared out of in the end.”  It is choked up in some places, in others riddled with shell-holes.  The sandbags have been torn asunder and gutted; they are crumbled, emptied, scattered to the wind.  The wooden props and beams arc splintered, and point all ways.  The dug-outs are filled to the brim with earth and with—­no one knows what.  It is all like the dried bed of a river, smashed, extended, slimy, that both water and men have abandoned.  In one place the trench has been simply wiped out by the guns.  The wide fosse is blocked, and remains no more than a field of new-turned earth, made of holes symmetrically bored side by side, in length and in breadth.

I point out to Poterloo this extraordinary field, that would seem to have been traversed by a giant plow.  But he is absorbed to his very vitals in the metamorphosis of the country’s face.

He indicates a space in the plain with his finger, and with a stupefied air, as though he came out of a dream—­“The Red Tavern!” It is a flat field, carpeted with broken bricks.

And what is that, there?  A milestone?  No, it is not a milestone.  It is a head, a black head, tanned and polished.  The mouth is all askew, and you can see something of the mustache bristling on each side—­the great head of a carbonized cat.  The corpse—­it is German—­is underneath, buried upright.

“And that?” It is a ghastly collection containing an entirely white skull, and then, six feet away, a pair of boots, and between the two a heap of frayed leather and of rags, cemented by brown mud.

“Come on, there’s less fog already.  We must hurry.”

A hundred yards in front of us, among the more transparent waves of fog that are changing places with us and hide us less and less, a shell whistles and bursts.  It has fallen in the spot we are just nearing.  We are descending, and the gradient is less steep.  We go side by side.  My companion says nothing, but looks to right and to left.  Then he stops again, as he did at the top of the road.  I hear his faltering voice, almost inaudible—­“What’s this!  We’re there—­this is it—­”

In point of fact we have not left the plain, the vast plain, seared and barren—­but we are in Souchez!