More shells whistled overhead. We started to run. Suddenly, at the bend of the road I stopped dead, breathless, paralysed by a ghastly sight. Under the sun, which, breaking through the branches, marbled the white road, lay a shapeless mass of mangled men and horses. The entire teams of the forge and store wagon were welded together in a writhing heap of bleeding flesh. Men were struggling underneath. In the middle of the road lay two gunners, face downwards; others were dragging themselves about on their hands among the fallen saddle-horses. Wounded were moving in the ditches. From this shambles rose long-drawn-out groans similar to the harrowing cries made by certain animals at night, a muffled and interminable "Aaah!... aaah!" rising and falling like some savage song. Blood was running in streams in the gutters on each side of the way. A nauseating stale stench, like that of a slaughter-house, a sort of warmth, an odour of steaming flesh and flowing blood, a smell of horses, entrails, and animal gasses gripped our throats and turned our stomachs. One man, who lay buried beneath the team of the forge, had succeeded in passing his arm through a mass of tangled intestines, but the viscera had gripped his wrist in a tenacious grasp. He shook them furiously, scattering jets of blood in all directions. Round him the horses lay writhing in their death agony, breaking wind, dunging, staling, and scraping the ground with their stiffening limbs, their shoes grating stridently on the flints. In their death-throes they strained at the traces and one heard a noise of cracking chains. The vehicle to which they were harnessed advanced a few inches, and then rolled back. Near-by lay a dead foot-soldier, his whole chest one gaping wound. In his wide-open blue eyes was a fixed expression of horror that went to my heart like a knife. An artilleryman, his stomach ripped open, had been pinned to the road in an almost erect posture by a wounded horse which, bleeding at the nostrils, had fallen across his feet. Whenever the groaning and wailing stopped for a second one heard the noise of the blood as it burbled and trickled stream by stream and drop by drop, and the gurgle of the intestines which lay in an entangled pink and white mass on the road. I ran to help the man buried under the forge team. His face was red all over, and horribly convulsed, his hair and beard glued with blood, and his white eyeballs rolling like those of one asphyxiated. A horse in its agony was threatening to kill a gunner wounded in the loins who was dragging himself along on his hands, so I quickly killed the animal with a revolver shot. It was only then that I perceived, stretched out between two horses, my friend M----, very pale, with closed eyes. I ran up and put my arm round him in order to lift him up.... All my blood suddenly ceased to flow, my heart stopped beating.... My arm had sunk up to the elbow in an enormous wound in my friend's back....