There was a great muddle in front. Troops of two different brigades were
hopelessly entangled in the shallow trenches they had taken from the
Turks. They had few officers left, and their staffs had the most
imperfect impressions of the whereabouts of their mangled commands. So
the sun was well up when we finally took over the line; this was in
defiance of all tradition, but the Turk was shaken and did not molest
us. The men who passed us on their way down grimly wished us joy of what
they had left; their faces were pale and drawn, full of loathing and
weariness, but they said little; and the impression grew that there was
something up there which they could not even begin to describe. It was a
still, scorching morning, and as we moved on the air became heavy with a
sickening stench, the most awful of all smells that man can be called to
endure, because it preyed on the imagination as well as the senses. For
we knew now what it was. We came into a Turkish trench, broad and
shallow. In the first bay lay two bodies--a Lowlander and a Turk. They
lay where they had killed each other, and they were very foul and
loathsome in the sun. A man looked up at them and passed on, thinking,
'Glad I haven't got to stay here.' In the next bay there were three
dead, all Englishmen; and in the next there were more--and he thought,
'It was a hot fight just here.' But as he moved on, and in each
succeeding bay beheld the same corrupt aftermath of yesterday's battle,
the suspicion came to him that this was no local horror. Over the whole
front of the attack, along two lines of trenches, these regiments of
dead were everywhere found, strung in unnatural heaps along the
parapets, or sprawling horribly half into the trench so that he touched
them as he passed. Yet still he could not believe, and at each corner
thought, 'Surely there will be none in this bay.'
But always there were more; until, if he were not careful or very
callous, it began to get on his nerves, so that at the traverses he
almost prayed that there might be no more beyond. Yet many did not
realize what was before them till they were finally posted in the bays
they were to garrison--three or four in a bay. Then they looked up at
the sprawling horrors on the parapet and behind them--just above their
heads, and knew that these were to be their close companions all that
sweltering day, and perhaps beyond. The regiment we had relieved had
been too exhausted by the attack, or too short-handed, to bury more than
a few, and the Turkish snipers made it impossible to do anything during
the day. And so we sat all the scorching hours of the sun, or moved
listlessly up and down, trying not to look upwards.... But there was a
hideous fascination about the things, so that after a few hours a man
came to know the bodies in his bay with a sickening intimacy, and could
have told you many details about each of them--their regiment, and how
they lay, and how they had died, and little things about their uniforms,
a missing button, or some papers, or an old photograph sticking out of a
pocket.... All of them were alive with flies, and at noon when we took
out our bread and began to eat, the flies rose in a great black swarm
and fell upon the food in our hands. After that no one could eat. All
day men were being sent away by the doctor, stricken with sheer nausea
by the flies and the stench and the things they saw, and went retching
down the trench. To keep away the awful reek we went about for a little
in the old gas-helmets, but the heat and burden of them in the hot,
airless trench was intolerable. The officers had no dug-outs, but sat
under the parapets, like the men. No officer went sick; no officer could
be spared; and indeed we seemed to have a greater power of resistance to
this ordeal of disgust than the men. But I don't know how Harry survived
it. Being already in a very bad way physically, it affected him more
than the rest of us, and it was the first day I had seen his
cheerfulness defeated. At the worst he had always been ready to laugh a
little at our misfortunes, the great safety-valve of a soldier, and make
ironical remarks about Burnett or the Staff. This day he had no laugh
left in him, and I thought sadly of that first morning when he jumped
over the parapet to look at a dead Turk. He had seen enough now.
In the evening the Turk was still a little chastened, and all night we
laboured at the burying of the bodies. It was bad work, but so strong
was the horror upon us that every man who could be spared took his part,
careless of sleep or rest, so long as he should not sit for another day
with those things. But we could only bury half of them that night, and
all the next day we went again through that lingering torment. And in
the afternoon when we had orders to go up to the front line after dusk
for an attack, we were glad. It was one of the very few moments in my
experience when the war-correspondent's legend of a regiment's pleasure
at the prospect of battle came true. For anything was welcome if only we
could get out of that trench, away from the smell and the flies, away
from those bodies....