The days passed into weeks, the weeks into months. He moved through impressions like a man hallucinated. And every incident seemed to beat on his brain, Death, Death, Death. All the decay and death of battle fields entered his blood and seemed to poison him. He lived among smashed bodies and human remains in an infernal cemetery. If he scratched his stick idly and nervously in the side of a trench he pulled out human ribs. He ordered a new latrine to be dug out from the trench, and thrice the digging had to be abandoned because they came upon terrible black masses of decomposing bodies. At dawn one morning when it was misty he walked over the top of Hill 91, where probably nobody had been by day since its capture. The heavy mist brooded about him in a strange stillness. Scarcely a sound on their immediate front, though from north and south came the vibration of furious drum-fire. The ground was a desert of shell-holes and torn rusty wire, and everywhere lay skeletons in steel helmets still clothed in the rags of sodden khaki or field grey. Here a fleshless hand still clutched a broken rusty rifle, there a gaping decaying boot showed the thin knotty foot-bones. He came on a skeleton violently dismembered by a shell explosion; the skull was split open and the teeth lay scattered on the bare chalk; the force of the explosion had driven coins and a metal pencil right into the hip-bones and femurs. In a concrete pill-box three German skeletons lay across their machine-gun with its silent nozzle still pointing at the loop hole. They had been attacked from the rear with phosphorous grenades, which burn their way into the flesh and for which there is no possible remedy. A shrunken leather strap still held a battered wrist-watch on a fleshless wrist-bone. Alone in the white curling mist, drifting slowly past like wraiths of the slain, with the far-off thunder of drum-fire beating the air, Winterbourne stood in frozen silence and contemplated the last achievements of civilized man. * * * * * A raiding party was sent out from his front. He watched the box barrage from the front line. The Germans filled the night with Verey lights and coloured rockets. Their artillery and trench-mortars and machine-guns retaliated fiercely. Smoke and gas drifted across. After interminable waiting the officer and three of the men staggered back, bleeding, blackened with smoke, their clothes torn to pieces on the wire. The raid had failed. * * * * * A Company of Gas Experts came up from the Base, and sent over some thousands of Stokes mortars loaded with a heavy concentration of poison gas. As soon as the last mortar was fired they were in a fearful hurry to get away. The German artillery retaliation smashed their trenches. Next morning, Winterbourne watched through glasses the Germans carrying out their dead on stretchers.