was a
grinning skull and little black animals like ants were climbing in and
out of the mouth and the eye-sockets. Its jacket was in good
condition, its arms were flung out beyond its head. I felt sick and
the whole place was so damp and smelt so badly that it must have been
horribly unhealthy. The sanitars began to dig a grave. Those who were
not working smoked cigarettes, and they all stood in a group watching
the body with a solemn and serious interest. One of them made a little
wooden cross out of some twigs. There was a letter just beside the
body which they brought me. It began: 'Darling Heinrich,--Your last
letter was so cheerful that I have quite recovered from my depression.
It may not be so long now before ...' and so on, like the other
letters that I had read. It grinned at us there with a devilish
sarcasm, but its trousers and boots were pitiful and human. The men
finished the grave and then, with their feet, turned it over. As it
rolled a flood of bright yellow insects swarmed out of its jacket, and
a grey liquid trickled out of the skull. The last I saw of it was the
gleam of the tin spoon above its boot...."

"We searched after that," he told me, "for several hours and found
three more bodies. They were Austrians, in the condition of the first.
I walked in a dream of horror. It was, I suppose, a bad day for me to
have come with my other unhappiness weighing upon me, but I was, in
some stupid way, altogether unprepared for what I had seen. I had, as
I have told you, thought of death very often in my life but I had
never thought of it like this. I did not now think of death very
clearly but only of the uselessness of trying to bear up against
anything when that was all one came to in the end. I felt my very
bones crumble and my flesh decay on my body, as I stood there. I felt
as though I had really been caught at last after a silly aimless
flight and that even if I had the strength or cleverness to escape I
had not the desire to try. I had been mocked with a week's happiness
only to have it taken from me for my enemy's ironic enjoyment. I had a
quite definite consciousness of my enemy. I had as a boy thought, you
remember, of my uncle--and now, as I moved through the wood, I could
hear the old man's chuckle just as he had chuckled in the old days,
snapping his fingers together and twitching his nose...."

They searched the wood until late in the afternoon, trampling through
the wet, peering through thicke