as he kneels to a dead man.

Bertrand!

Acute emotion grips us. He has been killed; he, too, like the rest, he
who most towered over us by his energy and intelligence. By virtue of
always doing his duty, he has at last got killed. He has at last found
death where indeed it was.

We look at him, and then turn away from the sight and look upon each
other.

The shock of his loss is aggravated by the spectacle that his remains
present, for they are abominable to see. Death has bestowed a grotesque
look and attitude on the man who was so comely and so tranquil. With
his hair scattered over his eyes, his mustache trailing in his mouth,
and his face swollen--he is laughing. One eye is widely open, the other
shut, and the tongue lolls out. His arms are outstretched in the form
of a cross: the hands open, the fingers separated. The right leg is
straight. The left, whence flowed the hemorrhage that made him die, has
been broken by a shell; it is twisted into a circle, dislocated, slack,
invertebrate. A mournful irony has invested the last writhe of his
agony with the appearance of a clown's antic.

We arrange him, and lay him straight, and tranquillize the horrible
masks. Volpatte has taken a pocket-book from him and places it
reverently among his own papers, by the side of the portrait of his own
wife and children. That done, he shakes his head: "He--he was truly a
good sort, old man. When he said anything, that was the proof that it
was true. Ah, we needed him badly!"

"Yes," I said, "we had need of him always."

"Ah, la, la!" murmurs Volpatte, and he trembles. Joseph repeats in a
weak voice, "Ah, nom de Dieu! Ah, nom de Dieu!"

The plateau is as covered with people as a public square;
fatigue-parties in detachments, and isolated men. Here and there, the
stretcher-bearers are beginning (patiently and in a small way) their
huge and endless task.

Volpatte leaves us, to return to the trench and announce our new
losses, and above all the great gap left by Bertrand. He says to
Joseph, "We shan't lose sight of you, eh? Write us a line now and
again--just, 'All goes well; signed, Camembert,' eh?" He disappears
among the people who cross each other's path in the expanse now
completely possessed by a mournful and endless rain.

Joseph leans on me and we go down into the ravine. The slope by which
we descend is known as the Zouaves' Cells. In the May attack, the
Zouaves had all begun to dig themselves individual shelters,