After a heavy rain, it was commonplace to see the bodies of soldiers lying facedown in pools or lakes of muddy water; once injured, their sixty-pound packs sealed their fate. A young British officer reported finding bodies of soldiers wounded on July 1 who had “crawled into shell holes, wrapped their waterproof sheets around them, taken out their Bibles and died like that.”52 War correspondent Sir Philip Gibbs saw more than most. “Dead bodies were heaped there, buried and unburied,” he wrote. “Men dug into corruption when they tried to dig a trench. Men sat on dead bodies when they peered
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