The sun shone palely and a fitful wind swept across the waste, a noxious wind, cold and dank, that chilled me with a sudden dread even while the sweat ran from me. I walked amid shell craters, sometimes knee-deep in mud; I stumbled over rifles half buried in the slime, on muddy knapsacks, over muddy bags half full of rusty bombs, and so upon the body of a dead German soldier. With arms wide-flung and writhen legs grotesquely twisted he lay there beneath my boot, his head half buried in the mud, even so I could see that the maggots had been busy, though the ....[1] had killed them where they clung. So there he lay, this dead Boche, skull gleaming under shrunken scalp, an awful, eyeless thing, that seemed to start, to stir and shiver as the cold wind stirred his muddy clothing. Then nausea and a deadly faintness seized me, but I shook it off, and shivering, sweating, forced myself to stoop and touch that awful thing, and, with the touch, horror and faintness passed, and in their place I felt a deep and passionate pity, for all he was a Boche, and with pity in my heart I turned and went my way. [Footnote 1: Deleted by censor. J. 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.