"
"One less to the squad!" says Volpatte as we go away.
We are now on the edge of the ravine at the spot where the plateau
begins that our desperate charge traversed last evening, and we
cannot recognize it. This plain, which had then seemed to me quite
level, though it really slopes, is an amazing charnel-house. It
swarms with corpses, and might be a cemetery of which the top has
been taken away.
Groups of men are moving about it, identifying the dead of last
evening and last night, turning the remains over, recognizing them
by some detail in spite of their faces. One of these searchers,
kneeling, draws from a dead hand an effaced and mangled
photograph--a portrait killed.
In the distance, black shell-smoke goes up in scrolls. then
detonates over the horizon. The wide and stippled flight of an army
of crows sweeps the sky.
Down below among the motionless multitude, and identifiable by their
wasting and disfigurement, there are zouaves, tirailleurs, and
Foreign Legionaries from the May attack. The extreme end of our
lines was then on Berthonval Wood, five or six kilometers from here.
In that attack, which was one of the most terrible of the war or of
any war, those men got here in a single rush. They thus formed a
point too far advanced in the wave of attack, and were caught on the
flanks between the machine-guns posted to right and to left on the
lines they had overshot. It is some months now since death hollowed
their eyes and consumed their cheeks, but even in those
storm-scattered and dissolving remains one can identify the havoc of
the machine-guns that destroyed them, piercing their backs and loins
and severing them in the middle.
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