The one to which we came was only partly filled with close packed ranks of swollen carcasses that lay there grinning, as if at some appalling joke. We stood above them, half strangled by the stench, and swung the blanket between us: then tossed the poor body in among the others. A billion flies leaped upward, as if in protest at this new arrival, and such was their buzzing and hissing that the row of dead men seemed to whisper and titter at their uninvited guest.

It came to me that this dead friend of ours was on the verge of speech. His eyes were open, staring above us as if horrified at what his soul must meet.

Who he was, I do not know. Certainly there was no one who seemed to care. The same thing must have been true of all the others in those pits. There were no names written anywhere—just a long row of bodies, already worse than hideous: men who had done as well as any men could do under the circumstances, and received nothing for it—neither pay nor food nor clothing nor thanks: not even decent sepulture.

There were shovels standing in the loose dirt beside the pits. When I picked one up, thinking to cover those bloated and revolting forms, a man stopped me: one of a pair who had brought another body. He wore the fragments of a blue and white uniform. His face bristled with a straggling red beard, and he crouched, as if something gnawed at his stomach. “No dirt,” he said. He panted and grunted. “Don’t cover till night. Makes rows irreg’lar.” He held his middle and moved an elbow toward the blanket which he and his companion had dropped.

“Put him in straight,” he begged. “We can’t do nothing but roll ’em in, all crooked.” He sat down suddenly at my feet. His companion staggered away through the mist. Doc Means and I swung the body into the pit: then turned our attention to the sitting man.

“What’s the matter with him, Doc?” I asked. It seemed terrible for a man to die here on the edge of the dead pits, though I cannot tell why it seemed so, when in reality it was the handiest place in which to die.

“Lemme be!” the man said. “I had smallpox and got over it. There ain’t nothing wrong with me now, only the flux. Everybody’s got it that ain’t got smallpox.”

“Isn’t there something he could take for it?” I asked Doc.

“H’ist me up,” the man said, as if fearful we might try to give him medicine. “I can walk if I’m h’isted up.” We hoisted him to his feet, and he lurched off into the mist, past other pairs of men dragging corpses.