The village has disappeared, nor have I seen a village go so completely.  Ablain-Saint-Nazaire, and Carency. these still retained some shape of a place, with their collapsed and truncated houses, their yards heaped high with plaster and tiles.  Here, within the framework of slaughtered trees that surrounds us as a spectral background in the fog, there is no longer any shape.  There is not even an end of wall, fence, or porch that remains standing; and it amazes one to discover that there are paving-stones under the tangle of beams, stones, and scrap-iron.  This—­here—­was a street.

It might have been a dirty and boggy waste near a big town, whose rubbish of demolished buildings and its domestic refuse had been shot here for years, till no spot was empty.  We plunge into a uniform layer of dung and debris, and make but slow and difficult progress.  The bombardment has so changed the face of things that it has diverted the course of the millstream, which now runs haphazard and forms a pond on the remains of the little place where the cross stood.

Here are several shell-holes where swollen horses are rotting; in others the remains of what were once human beings are scattered, distorted by the monstrous injury of shells.

Here, athwart the track we are following, that we ascend as through an avalanche or inundation of ruin, under the unbroken melancholy of the sky, here is a man stretched out as if he slept, but he has that close flattening against the ground which distinguishes a dead man from a sleeper.  He is a dinner-fatigue man, with a chaplet of loaves threaded over a belt, and a bunch of his comrades’ water-bottles slung on his shoulder by a skein of straps.  It must have been only last night that the fragment of a shell caught him in the back.  No doubt we are the first to find him, this unknown soldier secretly dead.  Perhaps he will be scattered before others find him, so we look for his identity disc—­it is stuck in the clotted blood where his right hand stagnates.  I copy down the name that is written in letters of blood.

Poterloo lets me do it by myself—­he is like a sleepwalker.  He looks, and looks in despair, everywhere.  He seeks endlessly among those evanished and eviscerated things; through the void he gazes to the haze of the horizon.  Then he sits down on a beam, having first sent flying with a kick a saucepan that lay on it, and I sit by his side.  A light drizzle is falling.  The fog’s moisture is resolving in little drops that cover everything with a slight gloss.  He murmurs, “Ah, la, la!”

He wipes his forehead and raises imploring eyes to me.  He is trying to make out and take in the destruction of all this corner of the earth, and the mournfulness of it.  He stammers disjointed remarks and interjections.  He takes off his great helmet and his head is smoking.  Then he says to me with difficulty, “Old man, you cannot imagine, you cannot, you cannot—­”