ears, 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.

Poterloo lets me do it by myself--he is like a sleepwalker. He looks,
and looks in despair, everywhere. He seeks endlessly among those
evanished and eviscerated things; through the void he gazes to the haze
of the horizon. Then he sits down on a beam, having first sent flying
with a kick a saucepan that lay on it, and I sit by his side. A light
drizzle is falling. The fog's moisture is resolving in little drops
that cover everything with a slight gloss. He murmurs, "Ah, la, la!"

He wipes his forehead and raises imploring eyes to me. He is trying to
make out and take in the destruction of all this corner of the earth,
and the mournfulness of it. He stammers disjointed remarks and
interjections. He takes off his great helmet and his head is smoking.
Then he says to me with difficulty, "Old man, you cannot imagine, you
cannot, you cannot--"

He whispers: "The Red Tavern, where that--where that Boche's head is,
and litters of beastliness all around, that sort of cesspool--it was on
the edge of the road, a brick house and two out-buildings
alongside--how many times, old man, on the very spot where we stood,
how many ti