"In the day-time the first dead were brought on hideous blood-soaked stretchers... Jack lowered them without shrouds into the graves. At night he stared into the fires, and then at the great overflowing mass of high white stars above him in untangled black. They trailed the sky and brought morning. He made more graves, did not bother to wash, and found that his clothes were filthy. Every day the ambulances became more numerous....
"...Jack had learned to distinguish the men he buried. Some he could see were killed by machine gun fire, some by shrapnel, some by disease. Some were officers, some had been dead a long time, some looked like people he knew, and some even looked like himself."
--'The Home Front' from "A Dove of the East" by Mark Helprin--
