F.]

But now, wherever I looked were other shapes, that lay in attitudes
frightfully contorted, grotesque and awful. Here the battle had raged
desperately. I stood in a very charnel-house of dead. From a mound of
earth upflung by a bursting shell a clenched fist, weather-bleached
and pallid, seemed to threaten me; from another emerged a pair of
crossed legs with knees up-drawn, very like the legs of one who dozes
gently on a hot day. Hard by, a pair of German knee-boots topped a
shell crater, and drawing near, I saw the grey-green breeches, belt
and pouches, and beyond--nothing but unspeakable corruption. I
started back in horror and stepped on something that yielded
underfoot--glanced down and saw a bloated, discoloured face, that,
even as I looked, vanished beneath my boot and left a bare and
grinning skull.

Once again the faintness seized me, and lifting my head I stared
round about me and across the desolation of this hellish waste. Far
in the distance was the road where men moved to and fro, busy with
picks and shovels, and some sang and some whistled and never sound
more welcome. Here and there across these innumerable shell holes,
solitary figures moved, men, these, who walked heedfully and with
heads down-bent. And presently I moved on, but now, like these
distant figures, I kept my gaze upon that awful mud lest again I
should trample heedlessly on something that had once lived and loved
and laughed. And they lay everywhere, here stark and stiff, with no
pitiful earth to hide their awful corruption--here again, half buried
in slimy mud; more than once my nailed boot uncovered mouldering
tunic or things more awful. And as I trod this grisly place my pity
grew, and with pity a profound wonder that the world with its so many
millions of reasoning minds should permit such things to be, until I
remembered that few, even the most imaginative, could realise the
true frightfulness of modern men-butchering machinery, and my wonder
changed to a passionate desire that such things should be recorded
and known, if only in some small measure, wherefore it is I write
these things.

I wandered on past shell holes, some deep in slime, that held
nameless ghastly messes, some a-brim with bloody water, until I came
where three men lay side by side, their hands upon their levelled
rifles. For a moment I had the foolish thought that these men were
weary and slept, until, coming near, I saw that these had died by the
same shell