The doctor whose services the man has impressed, tells us when he returns that he found the wounded man in a dying condition:
"The femoral severed, the leg almost torn away. I made a ligature and got him away on an ambulance; but he will never arrive alive at Mouilly."
It is five o'clock in the evening. We are on the way to the advance posts.
We march through a narrow clearing which is no more than a ribbon of black earth between piles of dead leaves on the one side, and all-invading moss on the other. The thickets are dense and filled with a sea-green penumbra. The sinking sun is directly behind us. Its failing light streams over the moving file of men, leaving golden reflections in the tin bowls fastened to their packs. The heads of the men rise and fall with their unequal steps, causing an undulation to pass from one end of the section to the other.
There is no talking. Our feet make no noise on that moist earth, in which each nail leaves a clear imprint. Occasionally, a timid twittering is heard amid the silence, as faint and self-effacing as the failing sun-rays gliding into the undergrowth between the leaves of the trees.
Suddenly the surly detonation of a 75 shatters the peace; soon all the guns hidden in the wood intone a brutal chorus; the clamour envelops us; each shot seems to hurtle past with a violence sufficient to burst the gun firing it. Then a murmuring echo flies from valley to valley, gradually becoming weaker and weaker until swamped by the tremendous outburst of another salvo. To all this noise, however, we are strangely used. It seems in some curious way to mingle with the material things about us, to harmonize with them, to belong as it were to the melancholy of the dying day. We no longer jump as the guns speak; we no longer hear them; we are conscious only of the curious melody of the echoes which decrease and decrease, then sound anew with increased force, decrease again and increase again, finally to die away in a sad, tremulous murmur which spreads far away over the earth.
The evening draws on. We are approaching the edge of the wood. Beside the road lie some tattered knapsacks, some shattered bayonets; a little further on blood-stained bandages are lying on the moss, shirts, a flannel waist-band, some nameless rags, the lining of a waistcoat; further on again the body of a dead man appears stretched to his full length, face turned to the earth.
All along the edge of the clearing are shell-holes at almost regular intervals; enormous roots which have been shattered display their pale wounds. Then the shell-holes concentrate, all of them being still within the clearing, mute evidences of an admirably-directed fire. The men affirm that our artillery placed a barrage along this marked line on the evening of the 24th. They have such simple faith, these men, in the power of our guns! It may or may not have been so; personally I prefer to believe that it was so.
We halt a little before attaining the edge of the wood in a clearing surrounded by giant trees whose waving tops are lost to sight in the darkening sky.
There is a vague odour of corpses, which from time to time becomes oppressive. A few steps from our little shelter a corpse is resting against a pile of faggots in an attitude of relaxation and peace. The man was eating when killed instantaneously by a shell; he still holds in his hand a little tin fork; his waxlike face reveals no sign of pain; at his feet lie an opened tin of meat and an iron plate—an object which reminds me of those in which day-scholars at communal schools bring their dinners, and which have letters of the alphabet and figures engraved round the edge.