By the side of heads black and
waxen as Egyptian mummies, clotted with grubs and the wreckage of
insects, where white teeth still gleam in some cavities, by the side
of poor darkening stumps that abound like a field of old roots laid
bare, one discovers naked yellow skulls wearing the red cloth fez,
whose gray cover has crumbled like paper. Some thigh-bones protrude
from the heaps of rags stuck together with reddish mud; and from the
holes filled with clothes shredded and daubed with a sort of tar, a
spinal fragment emerges. Some ribs are scattered on the soil like
old cages broken; and close by, blackened leathers are afloat, with
water-bottles and drinking-cups pierced and flattened. About a
cloven knapsack, on the top of some bones and a cluster of bits of
cloth and accouterments, some white points are evenly scattered; by
stooping one can see that they are the finger and toe constructions
of what was once a corpse.
Sometimes only a rag emerges from long mounds to indicate that some
human being was there destroyed, for all these unburied dead end by
entering the soil.
The Germans, who were here yesterday, abandoned their soldiers by
the side of ours without interring them--as witness these three
putrefied corpses on the top of each other, in each other, with
their round gray caps whose red edge is hidden with a gray band,
their yellow-gray jackets, and their green faces. I look for the
features of one of them.
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