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.
The smells and the flies; they were here in this railroad station in sickening profusion.
I call it a railroad station, although it had lost its functions as such weeks before.

The only trains which ran now were run by the Germans for strictly German purposes, and so the station had become a victualing point for troops going south to the fighting and a way hospital for sick and wounded coming back from the fighting.