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I drew back from those fat
corpses. They looked monstrous, lying there crumpled up, amid a foul
litter of clothes, stickbombs, old boots, and bottles. Groups of dead
lay in ditches which had once been trenches, flung into chaos by that
bombardment I had seen. They had been bayoneted. I remember one man,
an elderly fellow sitting up with his back to a bit of earth with his
hands half raised. He was smiling a little, though he had been stabbed
through the belly and was stone dead. Victory! some of the German dead
were young boys, too young to be killed for old men's crimes, and
others might have been old or young. One could not tell, because they
had no faces, and were just masses of raw flesh in rags and uniforms.
Legs and arms lay separate, without any bodies thereabouts.
Outside Montauban there was a heap of our own dead. Young Gordons and
Manchesters of the 30th Division, they had been caught by blasts of
machinegun fire, but our dead seemed scarce in the places where I
walked.


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