“God in Heaven!” said a railwayman with white hair; “why did the poor man come off the truck without looking round first? He made a terrible mistake. Here there is too much traffic for anyone to leave one’s post.”
The face of the dead man was intact, but sixty trucks had passed over his body, splitting it diagonally from the feet to the shoulders. We picked up, in one place and another, the remains—bleeding pieces of flesh, intestines, and, as I well remember, a hand clutching a piece of cheese. Death had struck the man as he was eating.
The extraordinary thing was that his overcoat remained whole: it concealed from view the hideous annihilation of the body. Lifting it slightly, I saw his discipline book, on which one could decipher the name Lamailleux.
“I think,” I said, “we’ve got him all now.”
An electric lamp, perched high up, gave a fitful light and seemed to be suffering from irritating twitches.
I decided that we should take a short cut back across “The Artillery”—a huge siding where munition trains had been shunted. But, as we got near the railways, a sentry appeared:
“Halt! Who goes there?”
None of us had thought of the password. The territorial barred the way with his rifle. He was adamant:
“I am sorry, Lieutenant, but you must go another way: those are my orders.”
A long turning brought us before another sentry.