lies.

I seek a solid footway to guide Joseph in--his wound is paralyzing him
by degrees, and he feels it extending throughout his body. While I
support him, and he is looking at nothing, I look upon the ghastly
upheaval through which we are escaping.

A German sergeant is seated, here where we tread, supported by the
riven timbers that once formed the shelter of a sentry. There is a
little hole under his eye; the thrust of a bayonet has nailed him to
the planks through his face. In front of him, also sitting, with his
elbows on his knees and his fists on his chin, there is a man who has
all the top of his skull taken off like a boiled egg. Beside them--an
awful watchman!--the half of a man is standing, a man sliced in two
from scalp to stomach, upright against the earthen wall. I do not know
where the other half of this human post may be, whose eye hangs down
above and whose bluish viscera curl spirally round his leg.

Down below, one's foot detaches itself from a matrix of blood,
stiffened with French bayonets that have been bent, doubled, and
twisted by the force of the blow. Through a gap in the mutilated wall
one espies a recess where the bodies of soldiers of the Prussian Guard
seem to kneel in the pose of suppliants, run through from behind, with
blood-stained gaps, impaled. Out of this group they have pulled to its
edge a huge Senegalese tirailleur, who, petrified in the contorted
position where death seized him, leans upon empty air and holds fast by
his feet, staring at his two severed wrists. No doubt a bomb had
exploded in his hands; and since all his face is alive, he seems to be
gnawing maggots.

"It was here," says a passing soldier of an Alpine regiment, "that they
did the white flag trick; and as they'd got Africans to deal with, you
bet they got it hot!--Tiens, there's the white flag itself that these
dunghills used."

He seizes and shakes a long handle that lies there. A square of white
stuff is nailed to it, and unfolds itself innocently.

A procession of shovel-bearers advances along the battered trench. They
have an order to shovel the earth into the relics of the trenches, to
stop everything up, so that the bodies may be buried on the spot. Thus
these helmeted warriors will here perform the work of the redresser of
wrongs as they restore their full shape to the fields and make level
the cavities already half filled by cargoes of invaders.

* * * * *

Some one c