ans on me and
we draw near. Pepin is full length, his feet and hands bent and
shriveled, and his rain-washed face is swollen and horribly gray.

A man who holds a pickax and whose sweating face is full of little
black trenches, recounts to us the death of Pepin: "He'd gone into a
funk-hole where the Boches had planked themselves, and behold no one
knew he was there and they smoked the hole to make sure of cleaning it
out, and the poor lad, they found him after the operation, corpsed, and
all pulled out like a cat's innards in the middle of the Boche cold
meat that he'd stuck--and very nicely stuck too, I may say, seeing I
was in business as a butcher in the suburbs of Paris."

"One less to the squad!" says Volpatte as we go away.

We are now on the edge of the ravine at the spot where the plateau
begins that our desperate charge traversed last evening, and we cannot
recognize it. This plain, which had then seemed to me quite level,
though it really slopes, is an amazing charnel-house. It swarms with
corpses, and might be a cemetery of which the top has been taken away.

Groups of men are moving about it, identifying the dead of last evening
and last night, turning the remains over, recognizing them by some
detail in spite of their faces. One of these searchers, kneeling, draws
from a dead hand an effaced and mangled photograph--a portrait killed.

In the distance, black shell-smoke goes up in scrolls, then detonates
over the horizon. The wide and stippled flight of an army of crows
sweeps the sky.

Down below among the motionless multitude, and identifiable by their
wasting and disfigurement, there are zouaves, tirailleurs, and Foreign
Legionaries from the May attack. The extreme end of our lines was then
on Berthonval Wood, five or six kilometers from here. In that attack,
which was one of the most terrible of the war or of any war, those men
got here in a single rush. They thus formed a point too far advanced in
the wave of attack, and were caught on the flanks between the
machine-guns posted to right and to left on the lines they had
overshot. It is some months now since death hollowed their eyes and
consumed their cheeks, but even in those storm-scattered and dissolving
remains one can identify the havoc of the machine-guns that destroyed
them, piercing their backs and loins and severing them in the middle.
By the side of heads black and waxen as Egyptian mummies, clotted with
grubs and the wreckage of insects