The second paragraph of Ernest Hemingway’s short story “A Way You’ll Never Be” describes a cluster of dead Austrian soldiers encountered during World War I: “They lay alone or in clumps in the high grass of the field and along the road, their pockets out, and over them were flies and around each body or group of bodies were the scattered papers.”

That’s the whole paragraph, 37 words of telegraphic description. Yet the detail — the flies, the papers and especially “their pockets out” — captures the scene. Somebody has already looted those pockets. Hemingway was also a war reporter with an unerring eye.

Later in the story Hemingway writes of the “guns hidden under screens of mulberry leaves to the left of the road,” visible “by the heat-waves in the air above the leaves where the sun hit the metal.” With almost adjective-free economy, he has placed you there, in the carnage of a century ago, where the hot weather, indifferent to corpse of friend or foe, has “swollen them all alike regardless of nationality.”

Around the dead are “stick bombs, helmets, rifles, intrenching tools, ammunition boxes, star-shell pistols, their shells scattered about, medical kits, gas masks, empty gas-mask cans, a squat, tripodded machine gun in a nest of empty shells, full belts protruding from the boxes, the water-cooling can empty and on its side, the breech block gone, the crew in odd positions, and around them, in the grass, more of the typical papers.”