The mayor passed on the information about her husband, but he was silent about the savagery that surpassed that of wild beasts. He did not tell her of the horror he had been made aware of. He did not tell her that in this war, in a single day, bodies fell by the thousand and that for fear of outbreaks of disease the corpses were thrown in batches into pits and then covered with quicklime and shoved quickly into tombs that were destroyed the very next day by bombardments. The men were returned to the soil and mixed in like fertiliser. He did not tell her that sometimes the dead were not buried, but left out on the parapets as protection against enemy bullets instead of sandbags. And when the position was lost, the trench was used as a communal grave by the opposing army, who tossed in all the bodies of their enemies. They wanted to forget about the bodies and move on to more killing without wasting time. Bodies were worth nothing.