sergeant of the 405th, Class 1914. A nice lad, too."

He takes away the handkerchief that is over the face. It is quite
young, and seems to sleep, except that an eyeball has gone, the
cheek looks waxen, and a rosy liquid has run over the nostrils,
mouth, and eyes.

The body strikes a note of cleanliness in the charnel-house, this
still pliant body that lolls its head aside when it is moved as if
to lie better; it gives a childish illusion of being less dead than
the others. But being less disfigured, it seems more pathetic,
nearer to one, more intimate, as we look. And had we said anything
in the presence of all that heap of beings destroyed, it would have
been "Poor boy!"

We take the road again, which at this point begins to slope down to
the depth where Souchez lies. Under our feet in the whiteness of the
fog it appears like a valley of frightful misery. The piles of
rubbish, of remains and of filthiness accumulate on the shattered
spine of the road's paving and on its miry borders in final
confusion. The trees bestrew the ground or have disappeared, torn
away, their stumps mangled. The banks of the road are overturned and
overthrown by shell-fire. All the way along, on both sides of this
highway where only the crosses remain standing, are trenches twenty
times blown in and re-hollowed, cavities--some with passages into
them--hurdles on quagmires.

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