west, the frightful odor of all this rotten flesh strikes the Germans
or the French. They lie there, an indistinguishable mass on the
ground, and the men are unlucky who watch by night in the listening
posts or the trenches. They think they are stumbling against a stone,
and it is a skull their feet are touching; they think they are picking
up the branch of a tree, and they have hold of the arm of a corpse.

However, in the shadow of this human charnel house, at the edge of
this bloody sewer, some little French soldiers come and go, eat and
sleep for months at a time. The dreadfulness of the sights, the stench
in the air, the tragic presence of death has not gripped their souls,
their courage or their nerves. They are no less confident and merry
than the others and, in the evening, when the setting sun adds the
purple of its shadows to the red of all the blood that has been shed
on the Butte, they sing from the depths of their charnel house sweet
love songs.... This is the most regally beautiful sight I have seen in
this war; it is the most splendidly moving example I know of what
personal sacrifice for one's country's sake can do.

One day, in a rest village in the neighborhood, I met a soldier from
one of the battalions which was encamped in the charnel house. He was
a boy twenty years old, who hurried along with a flower in his
buttonhole, whistling a tune.... He was so joyful that I asked him:

"You seem as happy as you can be."

"I have leave, Sir," he answered, "and in a week I shall go to the
country to see my mother. But, for the present, I have to go and take
the trench at Eparges...."