It was not comely now.
Peering into the wagon we saw that the dead man's face had been partly shot or shorn away--the lower jaw was gone; so that it had become an abominable thing to look on.

These two had been men the day before.

Now they were carrion and would be treated as such; for as we looked back we saw the wagon turn off the high road into a field where the wild red poppies, like blobs of red blood, grew thick between rows of neglected sugar beets.
We stopped and watched.

The wagon bumped through the beet patch to where, at the edge of a thicket, a trench had been dug.

The diggers were two peasants in blouses, who stood alongside the ridge of raw upturned earth at the edge of the hole, in the attitude of figures in a painting by Millet.