heartrending. It was the most dreadful thing that I saw at the front,
surpassing the forlornness of any destroyed village whatsoever.
And at intervals in the ghastly residue of war arose a smell unlike
any other smell. ... A leg could be seen sticking out of the side of the
trench. We smelt a number of these smells, and saw a number of
these legs. Each leg was a fine leg, well-clad, and superbly shod in
almost new boots with nail-protected soles. Each leg was a human
leg attached to a human body, and at the other end of the body was
presumably a face crushed in the earth. Two strokes with a pick,
and the corpses might have been excavated and decently interred.
But not one had been touched. Buried in frenzied haste by amateur,
imperilled grave-diggers with a military purpose, these dead men
decayed at leisure amid the scrap-heap, the cess-pit, the infernal
squalor which once had been a neat, clean, scientific German
earthwork, and which still earlier had been part of a fair countryside.
The French had more urgent jobs on hand than the sepulture of
these victims of a caste and an ambition. So they liquefied into
corruption in their everlasting boots, proving that there is nothing like
leather. They were a symbol. With alacrity we left them to get
forward to the alert, straining life of war.




V The British Lines


You should imagine a large plain, but not an empty plain, nor a plain
entirely without hills. There are a few hills, including at least one very
fine eminence (an agreeable old town on the top), with excellent