But they were cold now, and hungry, and suddenly very tired; and they had no real fire of battle in them; they had waited too long for this crowning experience of an attack, braced themselves for it too often to be disappointed; and I knew that they were glad. But they did not mind being glad; they pondered no doubts about themselves, only curled up like animals in corners to sleep.... Harry, too, no doubt, had braced himself like the rest of us, and he, too, must have been glad, glad to lie down and look forward after all to seeing another sunrise. But I thought of his doubts about himself, and I felt that this business was far from easing his burden. For me and for the men it was a simple thing--the postponement of a battle with the Turks; for Harry it was the postponement of a personal test: the battle inside him still went on; only it went on more bitterly. II There was a great muddle in front. Troops of two different brigades were hopelessly entangled in the shallow trenches they had taken from the Turks. They had few officers left, and their staffs had the most imperfect impressions of the whereabouts of their mangled commands. So the sun was well up when we finally took over the line; this was in defiance of all tradition, but the Turk was shaken and did not molest us. The men who passed us on their way down grimly wished us joy of what they had left; their faces were pale and drawn, full of loathing and weariness, but they said little; and the impression grew that there was something up there which they could not even begin to describe. It was a still, scorching morning, and as we moved on the air became heavy with a sickening stench, the most awful of all smells that man can be called to endure, because it preyed on the imagination as well as the senses. For we knew now what it was. We came into a Turkish trench, broad and shallow. In the first bay lay two bodies--a Lowlander and a Turk. They lay where they had killed each other, and they were very foul and loathsome in the sun. A man looked up at them and passed on, thinking, 'Glad I haven't got to stay here.' In the next bay there were three dead, all Englishmen; and in the next there were more--and he thought, 'It was a hot fight just here.' But as he moved on, and in each succeeding bay beheld the same corrupt aftermath of yesterday's battle, the suspicion came to him that this was no local horror. Over the whole front of the attack, along two lines of trenches, these regiments of dead were everywhere found, strung in unnatural heaps along the parapets, or sprawling horribly half into the trench so that he touched them as he passed. Yet still he could not believe, and at each corner thought, 'Surely there will be none in this bay.'