Waste deep in dead bodies

When night time came I was told I better go back and try and find the medics, where the medics were. I was told to follow this communication trench and it would take me back to where they had a medical unit. It was very dark, very dark at night and shells were exploding overhead. The Germans had a direct bead on our lines. I was going through something and I couldn’t even stand. Every step I took I went down to my hips. And the suction. It turned out to be a communication trench full of Australian dead bodies, and they had been there for a month or so, and the smell was something. If you’ve ever smelled a human dead body, you’ve never smelled any odour in your life until you have. You’ve never smelled a bad odour. Anyway, I got maybe a hundred yards, a hundred feet through that trench and I came to another trench and I saw what I thought was cigarette lights facing one another. And it turned out to be two boys that had dug a foxhole in the side of the trench, squatted down facing one another to escape the artillery gunfire, shrapnel, etc. I asked them where the medics were and not one, not one would usher a word. I shook their shoulders and they wouldn’t talk. Petrified with fear. Anyway, I left them and I found a dugout. I couldn’t see down in there and I stepped my way down five or six feet and I felt some cloth. So, I was scared myself and I laid down and stayed there to escape the shrapnel overhead and I fell asleep. When daylight broke the next morning, I’m laying between two dead Germans and they had their spiked helmets on. They never took their helmets off, they just throw the bodies in there.