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Show FEAR By Patrick MacGill. THE nocturnal rustling of the field surrounded rne, the dead men lay everywhere and anyhow, any-how, some head downwards in shell holes, others sitting upright as they were caught by a fatal bullet when dressing their wounds. Many were spread out at full length, their legs close together, to-gether, their arms extended, crucifixes fashioned from decaying flesh wrapped in khaki. Nature, vast and terrible, stretched out on all sides; a red star shell in the misty heavens looked like a lurid wound dripping with blood. Loos was a mile away from the trench and I was going down there for water. I walked slowly, my eyes fixed steadily on the field ahead ,for I did not desire to trip over the dead, who lay everywhere. As I walked sx shell whistled over my head and burst against the Twin Towers, and my gaze rested on the explosion. explo-sion. At that moment I tripped on something soft and went headlong across it. I got to my feet again and looked at the dead man. The corpse was a mere condensation of shadows with a blurred though definite outline. It was a remainder re-mainder and a reminder; a remnant of clashing steel, or rushing figures, of loud-voiced imprecations impreca-tions of war, a reminder of mad passion, of organized or-ganized hatred, of victory and defeat. Engirt with the solitude and loneliness of the night it wasted away, though no waste could alter it now; it was a man who was not; henceforth it would be that and that alone. For the thing there was not the quietude of death and the privacy of the tomb, it was outcast out-cast from its kind. Buffeted by the breeze, battered bat-tered by he rains it rotted in the open, The air was full of it, the night stunk with its decay. de-cay. Life revolted at that from which life was gone, the quick cast it away for it was not of them. The corpse was one with the mystery of the night, the darkness and the void. In Loos the ruined houses looked gloomy by day, by night they were ghastly. A house is a ruin when the family that dwelt within its walls is gone; but by midnight in the waste, how horrible hor-rible looks the house of flesh from which the soul has departed. We are vaguely aware of what has happened when we look upon the ten antless home, but man is sticken dumb when he sees the tenantless body of one of his kind. I could only stare at the corpse until I felt that my eyes were as glassy as those on which I gazed. The stiffness of the dead was coi municated to my being, the silence wa3 inl .c tious" I hardly dared to breathe. "This is the end of all ihe mad scurry and rush," I said. "What purpose dooij it serve? And why do I |