But always there were more; until, if he were not careful or very callous, it began to get on his nerves, so that at the traverses he almost prayed that there might be no more beyond. Yet many did not realize what was before them till they were finally posted in the bays they were to garrison--three or four in a bay. Then they looked up at the sprawling horrors on the parapet and behind them--just above their heads, and knew that these were to be their close companions all that sweltering day, and perhaps beyond. The regiment we had relieved had been too exhausted by the attack, or too short-handed, to bury more than a few, and the Turkish snipers made it impossible to do anything during the day. And so we sat all the scorching hours of the sun, or moved listlessly up and down, trying not to look upwards.... But there was a hideous fascination about the things, so that after a few hours a man came to know the bodies in his bay with a sickening intimacy, and could have told you many details about each of them--their regiment, and how they lay, and how they had died, and little things about their uniforms, a missing button, or some papers, or an old photograph sticking out of a pocket.... All of them were alive with flies, and at noon when we took out our bread and began to eat, the flies rose in a great black swarm and fell upon the food in our hands. After that no one could eat. All day men were being sent away by the doctor, stricken with sheer nausea by the flies and the stench and the things they saw, and went retching down the trench. To keep away the awful reek we went about for a little in the old gas-helmets, but the heat and burden of them in the hot, airless trench was intolerable. The officers had no dug-outs, but sat under the parapets, like the men. No officer went sick; no officer could be spared; and indeed we seemed to have a greater power of resistance to this ordeal of disgust than the men. But I don't know how Harry survived it. Being already in a very bad way physically, it affected him more than the rest of us, and it was the first day I had seen his cheerfulness defeated. At the worst he had always been ready to laugh a little at our misfortunes, the great safety-valve of a soldier, and make ironical remarks about Burnett or the Staff. This day he had no laugh left in him, and I thought sadly of that first morning when he jumped over the parapet to look at a dead Turk. He had seen enough now.