Except for the
agonized whine of the tackle-blocks and the buzzing of the flies the
place where we sat was pretty quiet. There were a million flies, and
there seemed to be a billion. You wouldn't have thought, unless you had
been there to see for yourself, that there were so many flies in the
world. By the time this was printed the cold weather had cured Europe
of its fly plague, but during the first three months I know that the
track of war was absolutely sown with these vermin. Even after a night
of hard frost they would be as thick as ever at midday--as thick and as
clinging and as nasty. Go into any close, ill-aired place and no matter
what else you might smell, you smelled flies too.
As I sit and look back on what I myself have seen of it, this war seems
to me to have been not so much a sight as a stench. Everything which
makes for human happiness and human usefulness it has destroyed. What
it has bred, along with misery and pain and fatted burying grounds, is a
vast and loathsome stench and a universe of flies.
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