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.