chest has sunk, his belly is hollow as a basin. With his
head upraised by a lump of mud, he looks over his feet at those who
come up on the left; his face is dark and polluted by the clammy stains
of disordered hair, and his wide and scalded eyes are heavily encrusted
with blackened blood. Eudore seems very small by contrast, and his
little face is completely white, so white as to remind you of the
be-flowered face of a pierrot, and it is touching to see that little
circle of white paper among the gray and bluish tints of the corpses.
The Breton Biquet, squat and square as a flagstone, appears to be under
the stress of a huge effort; he might be trying to uplift the misty
darkness; and the extreme exertion overflows upon the protruding
cheek-bones and forehead of his grimacing face, contorts it hideously,
sets the dried and dusty hair bristling, divides his jaws in a spectral
cry, and spreads wide the eyelids from his lightless troubled eyes, his
flinty eyes; and his hands are contracted in a clutch upon empty air.

Barque and Biquet were shot in the belly; Eudore in the throat. In the
dragging and carrying they were further injured. Big Lamuse, at last
bloodless, had a puffed and creased face, and the eyes were gradually
sinking in their sockets, one more than the other. They have wrapped
him in a tent-cloth, and it shows a dark stain where the neck is. His
right shoulder has been mangled by several bullets, and the arm is held
on only by strips of the sleeve and by threads that they have put in
since. The first night he was placed there, this arm hung outside the
heap of dead, and the yellow hand, curled up on a lump of earth,
touched passers-by in the face; so they pinned the arm to the greatcoat.

A pestilential vapor begins to hover about the remains of these beings
with whom we lived so intimately and suffered so long.

When we see them we say, "They are dead, all four"; but they are too
far disfigured for us to say truly, "It is they," and one must turn
away from the motionless monsters to feel the void they have left among
us and the familiar things that have been wrenched away.

Men of other companies or regiments, strangers who come this way by
day--by night one leans unconsciously on everything within reach of the
hand, dead or alive-give a start when faced by these corpses flattened
one on the other in the open trench. Sometimes they are angry--"What
are they thinking about to leave those stiffs there?"--