A Time to Love and a Time to Die

DEATH smelled different in Russia than in Africa. In Africa, under heavy English fire, the corpses between the lines had often lain unburied for a long time, too; but the sun had worked fast. At night the smell had come over with the wind, sweet, stifling and heavy-gas had filled the dead and they had risen like ghosts in the light of the alien stars as though they were fighting one last battle, silent, hopeless, and each for himself alone-but by the next day they had already begun to shrink, to nestle against the earth with infinite weariness as if trying to crawl into it-and if later they could be brought back some were light and dried out and the ones that were found weeks after were hardly more than skeletons that rattled loosely in uniforms suddenly far too big for them. It was a dry death, in sand, sun and wind. In Russia it was a greasy, stinking death.

It had been raining for days. The snow was melting. A month earlier it had been three yards deeper. The ruined village, which at first had seemed to be nothing but charred roofs, had silently, night by night, risen higher out of the sinking snow. Window frames had crept into sight; a few nights later the archways of doors; then stairways that led down into the dirty whiteness. The snow melted and melted,' and with the melting came the dead.