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