I will try and describe what a captured trench
looks like.  The trench smelt just like
a slaughter house in the cleanest parts.
In others it is impossible to describe
the smell.

Dead bodies were stacked in heaps in places
where there was available room and in
other parts where there was no room
they were left in the floor of the trench
and covered with a thin layer of earth.

Of course
as many as we could get rid of
were thrown up to help make bullet proof
parapets.  As some of these bodies
had been dead for some days when I
went through, and were horribly swollen,

Remembering that the weather is so hot
and that one wears as little as possible,
it is necessary to try and
describe the stench
that the men were eating, fighting, and
sleeping in.

In the trench I counted
7965382165073982 flies
who walked first on the perspiring live men
and then, so as to cool their feet,
they walked on the dead ones.

            —Captain Ivor Margetts from Hobart, Tasmania
            Writing from the Gallipoli Peninsula, 1915
            Quoted in L.A. Carlyon, Gallipoli (2001)