and round
these they were exterminated. Some are still seen, prone on the brim of
an incipient hole, with their trenching-tools in their fleshless hands
or looking at them with the cavernous hollows where shrivel the
entrails of eyes. The ground is so full of dead that the earth-falls
uncover places that bristle with feet, with half-clothed skeletons, and
with ossuaries of skulls placed side by side on the steep slope like
porcelain globe-jars.

In the ground here there are several strata of dead and in many places
the delving of the shells has brought out the oldest and set them out
in display on the top of the new ones. The bottom of the ravine is
completely carpeted with debris of weapons, clothing, and implements.
One tramples shell fragments, old iron, loaves and even biscuits that
have fallen from knapsacks and are not yet dissolved by the rain.
Mess-tins, pots of jam, and helmets are pierced and riddled by
bullets--the scrapings and scum of a hell-broth; and the dislocated
posts that survive are stippled with holes.

The trenches that run in this valley have a look of earthquake
crevasses, and as if whole tombs of uncouth things had been emptied on
the ruins of the earth's convulsion. And there, where no dead are, the
very earth is cadaverous.

We follow the International Trench, still fluttering with rainbow
rags--a shapeless trench which the confusion of torn stuffs invests
with an air of a trench assassinated--to a place where the irregular
and winding ditch forms an elbow. All the way along, as far as an
earthwork barricade that blocks the way, German corpses are entangled
and knotted as in a torrent of the damned, some of them emerging from
muddy caves in the middle of a bewildering conglomerate of beams,
ropes, creepers of iron, trench-rollers, hurdles, and bullet-screens.
At the barrier itself, one corpse stands upright, fixed in the other
dead, while another, planted in the same spot, stands obliquely in the
dismal place, the whole arrangement looking like part of a big wheel
embedded in the mud, or the shattered sail of a windmill. And over all
this, this catastrophe of flesh and filthiness, religious images are
broadcast, post-cards, pious pamphlets, leaflets on which prayers are
written in Gothic lettering--they have scattered themselves in waves
from gutted clothing. The paper words seem to bedeck with blossom these
shores of pestilence, this Valley of Death, with their countless
pallors of barren