d 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 among them
as if they were snares, and stumble in the medley of broken weapons or
bits of kitchen utensils, of water-bottles, fire-buckets,
sewing-machines, among the bundles of electrical wiring, the French and
German accouterments all mutilated and encrusted in dried mud, and
among the sinister piles of clothing, stuck together with a
reddish-brown cement. And one must look out, too, for the unexploded
shells, which everywhere protrude their noses or reveal their flanks or
their bases, painted red, blue, and tawny brown.

"That's the old Boche trench, that they cleared out of in the end." It
is choked up in some places, in others riddled with shell-holes. The
sandbags have been torn asunder and gutted; they are crumbled, emptied,
scattered to the wind. The wooden props and beams arc splintered, and
point all ways. The dug-outs are filled to the brim with earth and
with--no one knows what. It is all like the dried bed of a river,
smashed, extended, slimy, that both water and men have abandoned. In