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.